


Anastasis

by lindentree



Series: Surfacing [2]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Animal Death, Awkward Flirting, Beth Greene Lives, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, First Kiss, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Loss, Memory Loss, Minor Character Death, Motorcycles, POV Daryl Dixon, Past Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Reunions, Scars, Self-Harm, Smoking, Suicidal Thoughts, Survival, Survival Horror, Survivor Guilt, Symbolism, Ultimate Bethyl Fic List Spring Event: Regrowth, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use, Wilderness Survival
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:46:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 44,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23654812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lindentree/pseuds/lindentree
Summary: After all, she was just a girl.Just Maggie’s sister. Just Judith’s babysitter. Just one piece of a larger whole, who only mattered because she was connected to the rest, and insignificant in her own right.Just another dead girl.Just gone.[A Bethyl canon divergence AU and companion fic toSurfacing.]
Relationships: Aaron & Daryl Dixon, Daryl Dixon & Carl Grimes, Daryl Dixon & Carol Peletier, Daryl Dixon & Glenn Rhee, Daryl Dixon & Judith Grimes, Daryl Dixon & Maggie Greene, Daryl Dixon & Michonne, Daryl Dixon & Rick Grimes, Daryl Dixon/Beth Greene, Jessie Anderson/Rick Grimes, Judith Grimes & Michonne, Maggie Greene/Glenn Rhee, Rick Grimes/Michonne
Series: Surfacing [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1703143
Comments: 130
Kudos: 195





	1. in the desert

**Author's Note:**

> (Feel free to jump down to **Setting** if me waxing about the whys and wherefores of writing this fic is boring for you, which… Fair!)
> 
> Posting a companion fic to something I wrote nearly five years ago feels a little strange! But when I originally wrote [Surfacing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5266412/chapters/12151997), I also wrote some Daryl POV scenes because I thought it might be a dual-POV story. It quickly became apparent that _Surfacing_ was Beth's story, and that was that. But I keep nearly everything I write, so I had these bits kicking around. Last year I rewatched seasons 1-5 of TWD and felt all the despairing feelings about Beth's death and Daryl's sorrow. It was like grieving Beth all over again.
> 
> Watching S5 this time around, I was especially struck by Daryl's alienation from the group (Rick and Carol in particular) and found myself thinking a lot about what grieving Beth was like for him. I wanted to explore that, but I couldn't stand to work through it without knowing that reunion and relief were on the horizon. I revisited the stuff I'd cut out of _Surfacing_ , and found what I was looking for. This companion fic was born! A companion fic that has turned out longer and wordier than the first fic, oops.
> 
> This fic will be exclusively in Daryl's POV, will be about 5 (maybe 6) parts long, and will encompass the events of _Surfacing_. Just so you know what you're getting into should you choose to WIP along with me. <3
> 
>  **Setting** : It bears mentioning that I haven’t seen seasons 7-10 and I only saw about half of S6, so if there’s anything in here that isn’t copacetic with the show after S5, my bad. Consider this firmly AU! Details like who lives where, etc., I'm keeping in line with what I assumed at the time I wrote _Surfacing_. _Surfacing_ more or less takes place following 5x15, so we’ll go with that for this, too. It firmly diverges from canon and into sweet, glorious AU country after 5x08, regardless.
> 
> Huge thank you to M for holding my hand through the Sad Potato Project, and for always knowing exactly what's wrong, and to L for knowing exactly what kind of car Merle drove. <3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning:** The first chapter contains a lot of graphic details about the abuse in Daryl's childhood, as well as a lot of recurring themes of self-harm, and includes Daryl's POV of the events of 5x08 "Coda". There is also a brief mention of past underage sex that was not consensual. Please read with care. <3

_In the desert  
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,  
Who, squatting upon the ground,  
Held his heart in his hands,  
And ate of it.  
I said, “Is it good, friend?”  
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;_

__

_“But I like it  
“Because it is bitter,  
“And because it is my heart.”  
_

Stephen Crane, "The Heart" 

**i: in the desert**

Daryl’s memory holds onto the stupidest shit.

He wishes he could cut things out, like gutting a fish. A few cuts and the right amount of force, and the job’s done. Just a meal with no messy guts or bones to choke on.

His memory’s nothing like that. It’s nothing but bones.

He remembers his fourth-grade teacher, Miss Knox, and how she used to bring an extra sandwich to school each day just for him. She drove him to the public library once to sign him up for his own library card. He never used the card, but he remembers the car ride, how she smiled at him and let him play with the radio, and how he imagined for a moment that it was possible to have a very different kind of life.

But he doesn't remember third grade, or fifth, or much of high school at all, before he dropped out for good.

He remembers his first drink and his first joint and the first time he drove a car. He remembers the first time he had sex. He was 13 years old, and she was a high school girl Merle knew. She was pretty, and nice enough, but the entire act was absolutely terrifying to Daryl in spite of Merle’s detailed, cringe-inducing instructions, and he could tell she was high on something. Driving home after, Merle kept looking expectantly over at Daryl, but Daryl couldn’t find anything to say. Merle looked annoyed, _disappointed_ , like Daryl had fucked up so badly that Merle didn’t know where to begin. Then Daryl puked between his knees onto the floor mat, and Merle punched him hard in the arm and called him a _fuckin’ pussy_. Merle drove them home in a sullen silence that was intended to be a punishment, but was really a relief.

Daryl remembers the first time he rode a motorcycle. Merle had said he borrowed it from a friend, though he always was shaky on the line between borrowing and theft. Daryl stalled it six times in a row and got so angry he wanted to kick the thing over, but he didn’t. When he _finally_ got it going, he hugged the tank with his knees and felt the way the engine purred and growled between his legs. It made him breathless to hold all that power in his hands, to balance all that force with only the strength of his body. For the briefest moment, he felt like the bike could leave the ground, and him with it, and he could soar far and fast into the sky.

He remembers hunting at a lake with his dad and Merle when he was so small that Merle still carried his gun for him. They were standing on the long, wooden dock at the boat launch. Daryl talked back to his dad, being _mouthy_ again, and his dad tripped him. He fell into the dark, weedy lake, and he must not have known how to swim yet, because he remembers sinking beneath the surface and flailing his arms, panicking for what felt like ages before Merle hauled him out by his hair. As soon as Daryl knocked the water out of his ears, he could hear his dad laughing.

He remembers the nine days he spent lost in the woods on his own, eating under-ripe pawpaws and berries, his ass raw from diarrhea and poison oak. It wasn’t until years later that it occurred to him that, probably, someone should have come looking for him. That it would have been normal to expect rescue, and to be scared when it didn’t come. But he didn’t, and he wasn’t.

He remembers the woman who lived three houses down, who always had lemonade in an orange plastic pitcher in her fridge. On hot days, she'd give Daryl a glass and let him sit inside in front of her window air conditioner while he drank it. Once she gave him a Popsicle from her freezer. It was purple, and it stained his tongue. His dad backhanded him when he saw, splitting Daryl’s bottom lip. The bloody welt tasted sweet, like grapes.

Daryl doesn't remember his grandparents or his mom's sister, though he remembers they existed. They lived nearby, he thinks, but he doesn't remember them being around.

He remembers the way his mom smelled, like Virginia Slims and that boozy-sweat smell that only real drunks have, the smell that’s still there after a hot shower, seeping from their pores. He remembers reaching into the back of the freezer, scraping his bare arm on the thick, sharp buildup of ice, to get bags of frozen peas for her bruised face, and the way she’d always smile at him and say, “Thanks, butterbean.”

He remembers the day the house burnt down with her inside it. It’s still so clear: the bright sunshine and the stitch in his side as he chased after the other kids on their bikes, running as fast as he could. The stench of smoke and burnt plastic. The looks on the neighbours’ faces. He doesn't remember the days that followed, where they lived or whether he went to school. He thinks they lived in a motel for a while, and then in his dad's truck. 

He doesn't remember what happened the night Merle left, what finally drove him away. They never talked about it, even years later. There must have been a fight or something, but Daryl can’t recall. He only remembers getting up one morning to find Merle’s stuff gone, and his car, too. Their dad went on like nothing had changed, like it had always been just him and Daryl living in a trailer at the edge of the woods that didn’t have running water. It wasn't much later that the old man kicked Daryl so hard in the side that it hurt to breathe for weeks.

Daryl caught beatings all the time after that. His dad had never hesitated to let his fists or his belt do the talking, but it got worse after Merle left. Daryl can’t remember single instances; it’s all blurred together in his memory. He nearly always had a black eye or a sprained wrist or a fat lip, back then. His teachers never said anything to him, not that he was at school very regularly. That was when Daryl began to understand that when adults looked at him, they never looked too close. He began to understand that people could choose not to see what was right in front of them.

Daryl remembers his dad's friends. Low-lifes and bikers who pimped out girls in their old neighbourhood and sold cocaine to college kids. A loud-mouthed creep who made his living selling Nazi belt buckles and shit at the flea market. A wide-eyed, twitchy dude who hung around their place a lot and was always hot-knifing hash at the kitchen table. Every time a car backfired or some kids lit firecrackers outside, the guy would panic and yell shit in some language Daryl didn't know.

He remembers that just the sight of the muddled, greenish-blue anchor tattoo on his dad’s forearm was enough to make Daryl's heart race and his guts turn to water, even into adulthood. Once, years after his old man died, Daryl was at a gas station and the clerk had a faded navy tattoo that was almost identical, and Daryl left in the middle of buying a pack of smokes and a bottle of Wild Turkey to go puke behind a dumpster in the parking lot.

He remembers when Merle finally came back and took him away in the middle of the night, all of Daryl’s shit in a duffel bag thrown in the back of Merle’s ‘72 LeMans that he’d rebuilt with stolen parts. Merle drove so fast that Daryl’s breath caught in his throat, and both of them laughed like they’d really gotten away with something. Hours later, Daryl found himself in the driver's seat of the car down an empty alley in Marietta, waiting for Merle to finish burglarizing a Radio Shack, and he understood perfectly that nobody gets away with anything. Or from anything. Nobody like him, anyway.

Daryl remembers all of that. So many useless things from the old world, from his old life, the time _before_. He wishes he could trade them all for better things he knows happened but he’s somehow forgotten.

He can't remember the words Beth sang when she played the piano at the funeral home. But he remembers how the sound of her voice made him feel, like he couldn’t pull a full breath into his chest. He remembers the exact rosy-gold sunset colour of her hair in the candlelight.

He can't remember what they talked about all day as they sat in the kitchen of that place, eating peanut butter and jelly straight from the jars, drinking flat diet soda and waiting for that one-eyed dog to come back. But he remembers that he said something that made her laugh and wrinkle her nose, and that he laughed, too.

He remembers the uncertainty in Beth's voice when she murmured _oh_ , and the sick, nervous feeling in his stomach as he rushed away like a fucking idiot to open the door for a herd of walkers.

He remembers running and running and running, his breath sawing in his chest like a knife, until he arrived at a junction and didn't know which way the car went. Didn't know which way to go to find her, and, without her to follow, he stopped right there in the road and couldn't go on.

He remembers the hope that ached in his chest when he and Carol met Noah, and they learned that Beth was alive. Not dead, _just gone_ , like he’d told Rick and Maggie. Like he'd hoped, against all sense.

He remembers every moment in Atlanta. The narrow hospital hallway that felt all wrong the moment they walked in. _Stupid_ , he remembers thinking to himself as he scanned the space, the lack of cover or escape routes. The anxiety that twisted in his stomach when he saw Carol in that wheelchair and the cuts on Beth’s face, the cast on her wrist.

He remembers reaching for Beth, her thin shoulder under his hand, and then her ponytail swishing across his knuckles as she turned back. 

Then something happened that he still doesn’t understand. The cop wanted Noah, but Beth wouldn't have it.

"I get it now," she’d said. 

_Get what?_

The rest he remembers only in pieces, like a nightmare. Beth moved, quick as a snake, a glint of metal in her hand, and the cop’s gun went off. The hallway stank of gun smoke and blood, the shadows long and warped. Beth crumpled to the floor.

He pulled the trigger under his finger. He stood over Beth, the blood spreading across the faded floor tiles until it touched the toe of his boot.

He carried her out. 

She felt so heavy in his arms. He remembers that. Terribly heavy as he carried her down all those stairs, the sound of loud, ugly sobs ringing off the concrete walls the whole goddamn way. He cradled her warm body close, her head tucked into the crook of his arm, hot blood sliding onto his bare skin.

She always was heavier than she looked.

The parking lot is the last thing he remembers. Maggie screaming, Rick and Tyreese trying to take Beth’s body from him while Carol wiped his face with a damp handkerchief. Everyone was crying. So much screaming, and crying, and finally the growls of walkers. The slamming of a car door. Warm glass under his palm, tacky with drying blood.

Then a strange blur, hours he can’t account for. He knows they left Atlanta and headed northeast, toward Noah’s people up around Richmond, but he doesn't recall any of it.

Glenn tells him later that it’s called “grief fog", that short-term memory will fail when a person is stressed or in pain. When a person experiences _trauma_.

Maybe that’s why his memory’s like this. Maybe that’s why there are so many gaps. Like his brain’s a paper target at a shooting gallery, the wind whistling through all the bullet holes.

Daryl wishes he could choose what to remember and what to forget. If he could, he’d delete everything, rip each memory to pieces, burn it all down like they did that place in the woods. He’d obliterate it all, except that night on the porch, and the day in the funeral home, where they ate until they were full and talked about nothing at all that mattered, and he felt like he was somebody. Like he was somebody’s. 

Those memories he would keep.

Instead, he remembers what he remembers, and forgets what he forgets, and none of it matters, anyway.

Dead’s still dead. Gone’s still gone.

Crouching in the back of a van as someone drives it north out of Richmond, he stares out the rear window at the tops of trees as they pass, and he thinks about the texture of Beth’s sweater under his fingertips. He thinks about her hair brushing the back of his hand, and the last real conversation they had: everything he couldn't say to her, and the look of understanding that slowly dawned on her beautiful face.

_Oh._

While he and Rick were figuring out how they were gonna get her and Carol back, Daryl allowed himself to imagine all the things he could say when he saw Beth again. He thought of plenty, though most he knew he’d never have the balls to say out loud.

But in the end, he never got the chance to say anything at all.

***

Daryl floats above himself like his head’s a helium balloon attached to his body by a long string. He can see himself below, trudging along an endless stretch of sun-baked asphalt with the others. They walk until the blisters on their feet split and bleed. There’s no water and hardly any food, and everyone around him suffers.

He kneels on the forest floor and scrapes nightcrawlers up, breaking his nails in the sandy dirt, and he eats them alive, filthy and wriggling on the back of his tongue.

None of it touches him. He doesn’t care. Even the baby – he dully observes that she gets first crack at whatever water they find, and that Rick and Carl have her, and that’s as much as he can care about any of them. He's hollowed out, like a buck strung up over a trash bag of its own guts. 

Empty.

He starts to come back down into his body when Carol gives him the knife.

She cleaned and sharpened it, he guesses. It's narrow and light, a darting silver minnow of a blade, perfectly suited to Beth’s hip when she carried it for those weeks that they were alone together.

Carol kisses his forehead and he listens when she talks to him.

_You have to feel it. You have to let yourself feel it._

Later, he sits alone with Beth's knife on his belt and he digs a lit cigarette into the skin between his thumb and forefinger. Something splits open inside him and everything surges out at once, and he sits there leaning against the trunk of a tree, and he weeps.

He loves her.

He loves her, and he was only just beginning to realise he could feel that way about someone when she got taken. He had only just barely begun to _see_.

He loves her, and now all of the things they did together, all the things they saw and felt and said are his alone. He’ll be the only one to remember the colour of the moonshine-fueled flames against the dark sky, and how she grimaced when she woke up hungover the next morning, and how she’d groan her sister’s name in aggravation in her sleep sometimes, and the breathless way she laughed when he scooped her up in his arms to carry her to their breakfast of diet soda and pigs’ feet.

He loves her, and she's dead, and his love has nowhere to go, nothing it can be except pain and rage. It burns inside him so wildly that it feels like a physical thing lodged in his throat, choking him.

He cries until his head pounds and his throat is raw, and then he smokes another cigarette and breathes through the urge to puke.

When he walks back to the group, no one says anything. He feels their eyes on him, and it's as uncomfortable as it always is to know that they _care_. None of them even know what they’re pitying him for, except maybe Rick and Carol, and they don’t even really know.

No one does.

Then the sky opens, and some of them seem happy, standing there getting soaked in rain, laughing and lying down in the road, _crying to God, for fuck’s sake_ , but he feels empty again. Empty and drained and more tired than he's ever been in his life.

It’s the first time he ever really considers bailing on this whole shit show. Just taking one of the handguns and eating a bullet. He could do it quick, before any of them could do something stupid like try to stop him.

He doesn’t act on it. He just thinks about it, later, sitting in a piss-stinking corner of the barn where they hole up that night. He turns the thought over and over, her knife in his hands.

It’s so much to think about, though, and it’s exhausting. He’d have to pick the right moment and do it fast, do it properly. As the sun goes down and everyone settles in around the barn to sleep, the idea loses its appeal. Just continuing to survive is a hard habit to break, and it’s his turn to keep watch.

_You have to put it away._

He puts it away, and makes himself go sit with the others.

But when Rick calls them all _the walking dead_ , Daryl feels an uncomfortable resentment rise in him, and he turns away from all of them.

They’re not dead. They’re not _them_. They’re completely, painfully alive, and it’s fucking bullshit that they’re all breathing and she isn’t.

He doesn't sleep. He keeps watch and paces, and when rain and wind whip the sides of the barn and a herd of walkers hammers on the doors, he holds the dead at bay until the others join him and they all hold together.

They survive the night, and Daryl's awake to hear the first birdsong just before sunrise.

He’s been avoiding talking to anyone, but especially Maggie. He's afraid of what will happen if he does. What she might ask, and what he might fail to put into words she'd understand. But she's wading through a swamp the same as he is, and when she sits down beside him in the quiet dawn, he's surprised to find that it helps to talk about Beth.

It helps to say something about the girl he loves, even if it’s only what he can stand to say to Maggie, that Beth was _tough_. It helps to say out loud that she was real, that she was _here_ , that she was something before she was nothing. For a moment it’s like a light has turned back on, and Beth isn’t dead, just gone someplace else for a while.

Maggie smiles at him. It’s weak, but it’s still a smile. Maggie will be all right. She’s got Glenn, and she’s got that same thing that Beth had: hope, always. She takes the music box he fixed for her and leaves him to rest there in the dirt. 

Daryl watches as she crouches down to wake Sasha, and the two head out of the barn. There’s not much physical resemblance between Beth and her sister, and Daryl wonders if both of them took after their mothers. He can’t remember if Beth ever said. It’d be a strange thing to ask Maggie, so he guesses he’ll never know.

Anyway, it doesn’t much matter. Someday, he won’t even be able to remember what Beth looked like. Because she’s not gone someplace else for a while. She’s dead.

It feels like his chest has been blown open by a shotgun. Something bitter crawls inside that space. It curls up there and waits.

Then a stranger comes to them and says he has _good news_.

***

Daryl hates the place immediately, and most of the people in it. It's a comforting kind of contempt because it's one he felt long before the dead rose and walked. He'd have hated Alexandria, before, too, and there's familiarity in that.

 _Sheep_ , Merle whispers in his memory. _Found yourself a whole flock of dumb fuckin’ sheep, little brother, and there ain't a shepherd dog in sight._

The people in Alexandria are sheltered and stupid, and they look at him like a freak. Just like how Rick and Glenn and even Carol used to look at him, back before the CDC. They looked at him with suspicion and disgust, a foulmouthed, violent redneck who happened to be useful.

So there’s familiarity in that, too.

He guts a possum on Rick’s clean front porch, and only refrains from telling the woman in charge to go fuck herself because he knows it would anger Rick, and because he meant what he says: the boy and the baby matter. They deserve something that at least resembles a life.

The group gets two houses, but they spend the first night together in just one of them. Daryl sets up by one of the windows, right next to Judith’s playpen. The window has a good vantage point of the road that leads to the town’s gates. Everyone’s quiet and trying to act like they’re all right, but it’s not that easy. They’re tense, and when there’s a knock at the front door, everyone goes still.

It’s the woman in charge. Deanna. Doing the neighbourly thing, checking in on all of them. Saying some foolish bullshit about _jobs_.

_And I’m just trying to figure Mr. Dixon out. But I will._

Christ, he hates this shit. _Mr. Dixon_.

Daryl looks out the window and doesn’t respond.

Everyone eats, and then they settle in for the night, spreading themselves out on the floor beside one another like a pack of dogs. One by one, Daryl can hear them all drop off into restless sleep.

Rick is the last one awake with him, walking Judith around the house as she drifts off with her chubby cheek on his shoulder. When he comes to lay her down in the playpen, he looks at Daryl.

“Get some sleep.”

Daryl stares back at him for a moment, then grunts. Rick seems to accept this, for he nods, and then turns and leaves the room, flicking the last table lamp off as he goes.

The room is dark and quiet but for the sound of deep breathing and the occasional restless murmur from one of the others. 

Daryl sits, leaning against the window frame, until his back and his shoulders ache and his ass goes numb, staring out the window into the dim street.

He wants to leave.

He thinks about it, about stepping over the sleeping people around him and slipping silently out the door. He’d jump off the porch and run to the gates and be gone before whichever dumbass is on watch could stop him, if they’d even try. 

After that, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t care. He’d just be _gone_.

Judith turns onto her side in her sleep and heaves an enormous sigh.

Daryl slides off the coffee table he’s been perched on to sit on the floor, leaning against the wall beneath the window. Judith’s got one little arm thrown over her head and her other hand against her face. She makes soft snuffling sounds in her sleep. Daryl watches her for a long time. 

_Lil’ Asskicker made it. She_ made it. _Just like you did. Just like you said they all could’ve. I didn’t believe you. Couldn’t. But here they all are._

Daryl listens to the crickets outside, and he stares up at the ceiling and tries to make his mind go blank and fuzzy like it was right after Atlanta.

It doesn’t really work. His brain won’t shut up long enough for sleep to take hold. He’s barely slept in weeks and it’s wearing on him, but he can’t seem to pass out.

As soon as the others begin to stir in the morning, he heads out onto the porch, sitting down with his back against the railing, and has a smoke. His eyes feel like two charcoal briquettes lodged in his skull.

Rick comes out onto the porch and tells Daryl everyone’s going to _explore_. The whole group troops past with tense, hopeful faces, except for Sasha, who goes, but scowling. 

Daryl stays right there on the porch, watching people pass by on bikes, walking dogs, talking and laughing with one another like anything about this place is _normal_.

It unnerves him. It makes him feel like he’s going out of his mind, like someone is playing a massive, fucked-up prank on him.

What actually pisses him off, though, is Carol.

She puts on a clean outfit and a whole new personality, besides. It’s fucking strange, her in slacks and a sweater, going to make _casseroles_. Then she makes some crack about hosing him down, and he wants to shout _what the fuck is wrong with you?_

He doesn’t, though. He tells her she looks ridiculous, which she does, and she ignores him, disappearing down the sidewalk to go _meet the neighbours_.

It’s all a bit too much like finding himself stoned out of his mind at 4 AM watching an old rerun of _The Twilight Zone_ , half-asleep and uncertain what’s real.

 _Geek ears_ , he thinks. He wants to go out into the woods and kill him some walkers, string their ears on a bootlace and wear it around his neck. He wants to dig worms out of the bare dirt. He wants to eat a rabbit’s liver while it’s still warm. He wants to rub filth and blood and ash all over his skin. He wants to leave this place and go stay in the woods until something takes him out.

But he doesn’t, because Beth said he _got away from it_. She really believed that, and in spite of everything, some small, stupid part of him still wants to believe it, too.

That and, despite the load of bull they’re all currently buying, he’d rather be within screaming distance when the shit inevitably hits the fan.

So everyone goes off to explore. To make casseroles. To make friends. To learn names and faces and fit in. They all go off to do that on this beautiful, sunny day, and Daryl sits on his ass in the shade of the porch, and the bitter thing inside of his chest grows bigger.

It grows angrier.

He realises dimly that he’s pissed at all of them. It makes no sense; they don’t need to stay stuck like he is, just because he is. It’s nobody’s job to give a hot shit how he feels. It doesn’t matter. It never has.

A soft whisper: _it_ does _matter_.

Daryl gets to his feet, grabbing his bow as he goes. He skips the front steps and lands hard on the sidewalk, his shins protesting. He ignores the pain and heads for the front gates.

He needs to get out of this place before he explodes. Even if it’s just for a while. Even if it’s just for a minute, he has to get away. Before he does something to ruin it for the rest of them.

The gates are open as he approaches, the gatekeeper letting a group in. It’s Glenn, Tara, and Noah, and they’re with two of the locals. One of Deanna’s sons and the guy who let them in when they arrived with Aaron.

Daryl doesn’t hear what’s going on. He doesn’t need to. Glenn’s visibly pissed, anger rolling off him in waves that make Daryl’s scalp prickle. Others have gathered, Rick and Michonne and Maggie, as well as Deanna and a few random passerby. Deanna’s douchebag son tries to mad dog Glenn, and when he throws a punch that Glenn dodges, Daryl doesn’t even think. He just reacts.

His knees hit the concrete, his hands around the other guy’s throat. There’s barely a beat and then Rick’s on top of him, his arms around him, trying to haul him back, his voice harsh in Daryl’s ear.

_not gonna do this now_

Daryl lets Rick pull him off. The guy scrambles away, hands clutching his throat, stunned and terrified. _Good_. Daryl paces back and forth, unsatisfied, eager to split his knuckles open on the guy’s teeth, while Deanna and Rick try to calm everyone down, and Deanna takes the opportunity to ask Rick to be the fucking _town constable_.

Rick looks pleased, and so does Michonne. So do Maggie and Deanna.

After everything, Rick’s going back to being a fucking _cop_.

A wave of loathing surges through Daryl, and suddenly it’s Rick’s teeth he wants to knock out. He scoffs, grabbing his crossbow off the ground, and goes back the way he came.

This place is a fucking joke, and so is everyone in it. Including his group. Including him.

He wants to leave. He wants to go, and be gone.

But he doesn’t leave. He walks back to Rick’s porch, and crouches there with his knees bent and his face hidden behind his arms, and he thinks again about geek ears, and eating worms out of the ground, and the smell of his own skin burning.

***

One by one, everyone gets jobs assigned to them. They make friends with the townspeople, and when they gather at Rick’s for meals, there are names mentioned in passing that Daryl doesn’t recognize. Neighbours and friends. The doctor and the woman who makes jam and the guy on Maple Street who knows a thing or two about gardening.

Strangers. He doesn't want to get to know these strangers. He can't stand any more people.

Daryl doesn’t get a job. He doesn’t make friends. He sleeps on Rick’s living room floor, and sometimes out on the porch.

No one mentions Beth anymore.

Not that they did, much, before. Some of them didn't even know her, after all. Hell, Daryl barely knew her until after the prison. Until it was just them, and she saved him.

But it’s been a little over six weeks since Atlanta, and Maggie and Glenn and Rick and Carol and Carl and Michonne and the others from the prison don't talk about her anymore. They don't ask him their clumsy questions, either, their head-tilted, _How're you holding up?_ questions.

That’s how it works, now. That’s how it has to be. People can’t get bogged down in every single loss. 

Besides, Daryl’s passed the allotted amount of time for mourning a member of the group. There’s no reason for him to still wake up every morning feeling like something is crawling up his throat to strangle him. No one expects him to still give a shit. 

After all, she was just a girl.

Just Maggie’s sister. Just Judith’s babysitter. Just one piece of a larger whole, who only mattered because she was connected to the rest, and insignificant in her own right.

Just another dead girl. 

Just gone.

***

Rick and Carol want a back-up plan for if – _when_ – the safe zone gets overrun or attacked. Daryl doesn’t disagree.

Meeting with them out in the woods about sneaking the guns out of inventory is oddly comforting. It’s familiar. It makes more sense to him to be making a plan than to be sitting around failing to do whatever it is these supposedly normal people do all day. It’s good to know, too, that he’s not the only one who thinks this place is full of dipshits.

They’re both squirrely as hell about the whole thing, but he goes along with it, because what the hell else is he going to do, exactly? Rick still calls most of the shots, and Carol calls plenty of her own, too, and the way they look at him, he knows they expect him to fall in line.

Fine. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It never has.

But then Carol tells him he has to _try_.

She doesn’t finish the sentence, but he can fill in the blanks just fine on his own. She means try to fit in. Try to adapt. Try to be normal.

Try to move on.

Daryl doesn’t agree to her request or bother to argue. He chews the inside of his lip and says nothing, and the three of them walk back to the safe zone without speaking. As they draw closer to the gates, a sick feeling builds in the pit of Daryl’s stomach, and he veers away, ignoring their calls to him, and goes into the woods.

He walks for a time, leaving the road and the town behind, and every step he takes, he feels the knots in his stomach loosen. Eventually he stops at the bank of a narrow stream and looks around.

It’s overcast and cool enough that Daryl’s actually comfortable. He’s always been hot-blooded, and it feels good when the breeze touches his bare arms. He splashes his way across the creek and heads into deeper woods.

In his path, he spots a small pile of deer scat. It hasn’t dried up, yet, and when he crouches down and touches it, it’s still holding a bit of body heat from the deer that left it there, more than can be accounted for by the air, given its shady location. The deer was here recently.

Daryl scans the ground, and spots the deer’s small, pointed prints, heading southwest.

He stands and tracks the trail for a while, but when he follows it into a clearing, he finds it’s been trod over by walkers, and the trail’s all mucked up. There’s no blood or gore anywhere that he can see, so the deer must have passed through before the walkers. But he can’t seem to pick it up, though he beats the bush, kicking the leaf litter aside in search of even one little hoofprint.

Annoyed, he’s standing there scanning the forest floor when he hears a branch snap.

He lifts his bow and turns in the direction of the noise, but he can’t see anything between the trees. Keeping his bow up in one hand, he follows it. It didn’t sound anything like a deer, or walkers, for that matter. He wants to know what it was.

Daryl walks somewhat aimlessly for several minutes, still checking the ground for the deer’s trail, waiting for whatever’s in the woods with him to make another sound.

Then he hears a branch snap off to his side, and the distinctive sound of a person’s footfall. He spins, lifting his crossbow.

“Come out! Now!”

Hands raised, Aaron emerges from behind a thick stand of bush, looking sheepish and only slightly wary of the crossbow trained on his face. Daryl lowers his weapon.

“You can tell the difference between walkers and humans by sound?”

It’s a stupid question, as far as Daryl is concerned, but then, he shouldn’t be surprised that someone from Alexandria doesn’t know their ass from their elbow.

Daryl lets Aaron follow him, anyway. He talks, which is not ideal, but he's careful enough that Daryl can't even reasonably tell him to shut the fuck up, so he lets him. 

That would have been tolerable enough – fucking irritating, but tolerable, because Aaron can talk all he wants but that doesn’t mean Daryl has to answer – but then there’s the goddamn horse.

The horse stands, his flesh twitching with nerves, and he watches the two of them from the edge of the field where the trees give way to tall grass and wildflowers.

Aaron tells Daryl he’s been trying to catch him. They stand in silence and watch the horse watch them, his massive prey eyes belying the inner calculations he makes, weighing their presence against his need to graze.

Eventually the horse calms enough to allow himself to rip a few mouthfuls of grass up from the turf, but his whole body is still tense and flinching, waiting for something to lunge at him.

What a mindfuck, Daryl thinks, for the horse to one day trust the two-legged creatures around him, and the next, find them trying to rip the meat from his bones.

Daryl wants to catch him. He wants to help Aaron take the horse back to Alexandria so that he will be safe and a bunch of children Daryl’s avoided meeting will be happy. He wants the stupid horse not to be afraid anymore.

So he takes the lead rope from Aaron, and he tries.

The horse gets away, of course, and, like idiots, he and Aaron maintain hope and track it, and then they get the pleasure of watching a handful of walkers take the animal down as it screams in terror.

They take care of the walkers, too little, too late, and Aaron puts the horse out of its misery.

Daryl stands behind him and watches dark blood and brain matter leak out into the dirt, and though he expects to maybe feel something like envy, he doesn’t. The horse isn’t better off dead and no longer suffering. It isn’t anything at all, now. It’s nothing. It’s gone.

Aaron's disappointed. More than disappointed; Daryl can see that catching the horse meant something more to Aaron. When Daryl hears the break in Aaron’s voice, the guilt for not having caught the horse in time, Daryl feels sick and sad, his chest aching. The guy just wanted to catch a stupid, scared animal and give it a home, give the orphaned kids in the safe zone something to smile about. 

Daryl remembers Beth standing by the railroad tracks, the morning after they fled the prison together, her stubborn hope sputtering out when they found the mess the walkers had made of the children who’d called the prison home. The empty little shoe just lying there in the gore.

That things always end this way, _completely fucked_ , doesn't make it any easier to stand.

But the only other option is to be gone. To be nothing.

“You were tryin’ to help him,” he says, for whatever it’s worth to Aaron.

They walk back to the walls together, in silence.

***

Daryl tries.

Aaron said he should go to the party. He stands outside Deanna and Reg’s house and watches the silhouettes moving across the clean, tasteful drapes. People talking and laughing, and music playing. Normal people doing normal things, he guesses, except it was never normal for him and that, at least, has not changed at all.

This isn’t the kind of party he’d have gone to before the turn, and it sure as shit isn’t now, either.

He turns and walks back to Rick's.

But then Aaron sees him from his front porch and invites him in for dinner. For some _serious spaghetti_.

He stands there in the street, feeling like he could jump out of his skin, as Aaron waits for him to answer.

Carol told him to _try_.

Beth would want him to try, too. She’d be trying, if she was here. He'd look over at her and she'd give him an encouraging smile, a little wobble of her head.

_C'mon. You can do it. You can._

If she wasn’t gone, and nothing. 

Daryl puts one foot in front of the other, and he follows Aaron inside, his ears burning when he catches a glimpse of the small, pleased smile on Aaron's face.

It’s warm and welcoming inside their house. Eric is sitting at the kitchen counter, his busted ankle resting up on another stool, and he grins when Daryl shuffles awkwardly into the room. Aaron clears his throat.

“Look who I found outside.”

“An escapee from _The Party_ ,” Eric says, shuddering. “Please, Aaron, get this poor man a drink.”

Aaron pours him a large glass of red wine, and it gives Daryl something to do with his hands while he stands there feeling clumsy and out-of-place, watching the two of them finish making dinner.

There’s something different about a house when people who love each other live there. It’s like something else lives there with them. Something warm. Daryl remembers feeling the same way the first time he stepped over the threshold of Hershel Greene’s house. Whatever else the Greenes were, it was clear that they were the kind of family who loved each other.

It was strange. It made him feel like an alien. It still does.

But it’s bearable. Strange, but bearable, because they sit down to eat, and Aaron and Eric find a way to carry the conversation through Daryl’s long silences without excluding him altogether. They don’t ask him anything about before. They don’t ask him how he’s adjusting or what he thinks of Alexandria. 

Daryl likes Aaron. Eric too, and it’s only partly because the two men make a mean spaghetti dinner.

It’s something else. Something about Aaron's eyes when he listens, how he seems to understand a lot without Daryl having to explain. There’s no pity in him, just a quiet kindness that makes Daryl feel like the way he is might actually be _okay_.

They're just nice people, _good people_ , and eating dinner with them isn't painful or annoying. It's okay. It might even be good. Then, as they’re finishing up, Eric lets it slip. They want him for something.

They want him to take Eric’s place with Aaron out on scouting runs.

It annoys him, a bit, that they got him in here and fed him dinner and wine instead of just asking him straight up. But it’s not like that, or not exactly like that. Daryl can tell. They’d have invited him in anyway. So he considers it while he stands in Aaron’s bright garage and looks at the collection of random bike parts spread out all over the place. 

It's something to do, something to keep him busy, and that's probably for the best. It's dangerous too, which suits him – if he dies out there trying to convince random assholes to join this joke of a town, that's fine.

It’ll take him outside the walls. Like Aaron says. That appeals to him.

But in the end, what decides it for him is the way Aaron says, _you_ do _know the difference between a good person and a bad person._

Beth would want him to do this. She would want this for him. He knows that, somehow, deep in his bones, in the pit of his guts. She would believe that this matters, that this is the job he has to do.

So he nods. He tells Aaron he’s gonna get him some rabbits, and Aaron smiles.

He meets with Rick and Carol again, and he says he doesn’t want one of the guns they’ve stolen, because Carol told him to try, and he is. He’s fucking _trying_. 

They look at him like he’s a stranger. 

When they get back to Alexandria, they go their separate ways.

The next morning, Daryl gets up before dawn, goes out into the woods, and catches three rabbits for Aaron.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **anastasis** noun, sing., from Ancient Greek ἀνάστασις (anástasis, “resurrection”).  
> 1\. a recovery from a debilitating condition, especially irradiation of human tissue  
> 2\. rebirth  
> 3\. resurrection
> 
>  **anastases** noun, plural  
> 1\. a representation, in Byzantine art, of Christ harrowing hell.
> 
> Thanks for reading. <3 More soon.
> 
> Find me on tumblr at [littlelindentree](http://littlelindentree.tumblr.com/).


	2. a pillar of fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The response to this story has been so kind. I'm humbled, and I only hope I can make this journey worth your while. I promise to do my best. <3
> 
>  **Warnings:** Mind the tags always, but specifically, there are some mentions of suicidal ideation and self-harm in this chapter, as well as some gore and a canonical minor character death. There's also lots of smoking. It's Daryl, so there will always be lots and lots of smoking.

_You want to know what it was like?  
It was like my whole life had a fever.  
Whole acres of me were on fire.  
The sun talked dirty in my ear all night.  
I couldn’t drive past a wheatfield without doing it violence.  
I couldn’t even look at a bridge.  
I used to go out in the brush sometimes,  
So far out there no one could hear me,  
And just burn.  
I felt all right then.  
I couldn’t hurt anyone else.  
I was just a pillar of fire.  
It wasn’t the burning so much as the loneliness.  
It wasn’t the loneliness so much as the fear of being alone.  
Christ look at you pouring from the rocks.  
You’re so cold you’re boiling over.  
You’ve got stars in your hair.  
I don’t want to be around you.  
I don’t want to drink you in.  
I want to walk into the heart of you  
And never walk back out._

Nico Alvarado, "Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls"

**ii: a pillar of fire**

Weeks pass.

The group moves out of Rick’s and spreads out into other houses in the community. Daryl stays. He doesn’t need his own place and he doesn't want it; he’d rather be close to Carl and Judith. He has a room at Rick's, and that's good enough.

There are four bedrooms upstairs, but he doesn’t want to be up there. Rick offers him a room on the main floor, instead. There’s a massive, solid oak desk in there, the top still smeared with dust and a vague outline where a computer once sat. Big, ugly thing is a complete waste of good wood as far as Daryl can tell; looks like something that belongs in a lawyer’s office, not a bedroom in a house. But he guesses that’s what it was like, before, for some people. Some people needed a separate room and a fancy desk in their million dollar house to read their fucking emails.

Daryl hauls the desk out himself, banging it down the steps of the front porch. He leaves it out on the sidewalk. It’s gone by the next day, and it gives him a juvenile rush of punk amusement to imagine the Alexandria Committee for Sidewalk Maintenance and Beautification or whatever, quickly coming to take the desk away before it disrupts the aesthetic of the whole neighbourhood.

The room is larger than it seemed, once the oversized desk is out. It’s plenty big enough for a bedroom. Daryl’s certainly bedded down in much shittier places, before and after the turn. His first bedroom was technically a closet just big enough to curl up in, when Merle couldn’t stand sharing a room anymore and kicked him out.

It’s fine. It's four walls and a window and a roof over his head. It has a door that locks. It even has a bed, eventually, when Carol arranges to have one brought over from Inventory.

Anyway, he doesn’t spend much time at Rick’s, except to sleep and eat, and when it’s his turn to keep an eye on Lil’ Asskicker. He’s usually out hunting, or over at Aaron and Eric’s working on the bike.

The jumble of motorcycle parts in Aaron's garage is missing a number of key items, so the first scouting trips they take in the car have them visiting junk yards and garages. They clear a couple of auto shops and dealerships out, and Daryl finds most of the missing parts. But it takes nearly a month before he finds the last thing he needs: an intake manifold that actually fits.

Daryl's up until midnight that night, crouching beside the bike in Aaron's garage, a couple of moths circling the overhead lights while crickets chirp in the hedges outside. He puts the final pieces of the bike together, piece by painstaking piece, his back aching and his arms filthy to the elbows with grease.

When he finally has everything in place, he tries the ignition. Nothing happens.

"Shit."

After tinkering for a while, he ends up taking the fuse box apart and putting it back together. This time, when he tries the ignition, the bike gives a short cough and roars to life.

Getting to his feet, Daryl listens as the engine hums along smoothly, filling the small, concrete space with noise and vibration. Something that almost feels like a smile pulls at his mouth.

He built this thing and he gets to ride it.

The door to the house opens, and Aaron pokes his head into the garage.

"So, does this mean you're up for a run this week?"

“Hell yeah.”

When Aaron goes back inside, Daryl switches the engine off. He tidies up slowly, wiping every tool clean of grease before putting them all back in their places. He scrubs his hands and throws the grungy cover back over the bike. Closing the garage door behind him, he walks back to Rick's place in the moonlight. As he goes, he rubs his fore and middle fingers against each other, jonesing a bit. It’s been a while since he’s turned up any smokes.

Maybe when he and Aaron go out, they can swing into a couple of spots that might still have some lying around. Take his bike on a test run and have a smoke. That’d be a pretty good day.

The moon is high and bright enough that it illuminates the street, making long shadows of the trees and houses as he passes them.

It hits him out of nowhere as he walks, as he listens to the night breeze brush the dry fall leaves still clinging to the trees’ branches against one another. He doesn't know what triggers it, but something does, and suddenly there’s a low, buzzing sound in his ears that fills the quiet.

He misses Beth.

The pain that comes with thinking of her is so sharp that he stops and blinks up at the clear, starry sky as his eyes sting.

It’s fucked up, how this still happens. How it will jump up and shock him like he’d touched a live wire. She’s dead and has been for a few months, now. She’s been gone far longer than they were together. Hell, he only knew her for a little over a year and a half, anyway. It doesn’t make any sense that she should still be able to fuck him up like this.

But she does.

She’d have liked this place, he thinks. She’d have fit right in here. Shit, these people would have been thrilled to meet her, friendly and kind and capable and hard-working as she was. She’d probably have gotten a job watching the little kids or maybe even teaching the older ones. He can picture her as a schoolteacher: patient and gentle, teaching the kids to read and sing and follow the Golden Rule, going home each night to Maggie and Glenn’s.

 _Stop_.

Daryl puts one foot in front of the other and keeps walking, the hum in his ears tightening into a sharp whine. With one hand, he rubs at the side of his head.

It’s pointless, thinking about what might have been. He’s gone down this road a dozen times since they got to Alexandria, and he has to put a stop to it when it happens. When he lets himself think about her being here, it fucks him up. Makes him think about the woods, and the worms, and the dirt. It makes him think about disappearing.

But not thinking about her at all, ever, is so much worse. 

It’s bad enough that no one talks about her. To not even think about her, to not even allow himself to at least take out his memories of her from time to time and run his fingers over them, feels like erasing her. Like pretending she never existed at all.

Daryl wants to remember her, even though it hurts. He doesn't want to lose what little he had of her.

He’s almost to Rick’s porch when he sees Maggie and Glenn leaving the house, hand-in-hand. They don’t notice him as he approaches, and they stand under the porchlight. Glenn says something too quiet for Daryl to hear, and Maggie laughs.

It’s there and gone in a flash, but it’s real: he sees Beth in her sister’s smile.

“Hey, Daryl.”

They stand on the top step and smile down at him, still holding hands, the porchlight bright behind them. A sick, lonely feeling tightens Daryl’s chest, but he nods to them.

“Hey.”

"We stayed after dinner to hang out for a bit, and it got late before we even realised," Glenn says, his words sliding together in a tipsy slur. "Got into some of the wine they have stashed away here, too."

The buzzing in Daryl’s ears has faded somewhat to a quieter hum, but it still makes their voices sound strange and muffled.

"Did you eat?" Maggie asks.

Daryl nods, and his fingers twitch as he thinks again about how badly he wants a cigarette.

Maggie tilts her head a little, looking at him more closely.

"Feels like I've hardly seen you since you started going out there to scout with Aaron. How're you holding up?"

It's the first time in a long time that she's asked in that specific tone. Maybe he could answer honestly; she asked, after all. She wants to know. Except there's something in her eyes, something fragile, and he knows what kind of answer she wants. What kind of answer she can stand to hear, and what kind she can't.

"Doin' all right, I guess."

He’s never been much of a liar. Neither of them seem to fully believe him, their forced cheerfulness flagging.

Daryl wishes someone would come right out and ask whatever it is they want to know. Say her name, if that's what they're really talking about. He wants to talk about her. He’d welcome it, regardless of how shitty the conversation might go.

_Say her name. Please._

“You comin’ from Aaron’s?” Maggie asks.

“Yep. Finally got that bike runnin’.”

“Nice,” Glenn says, smiling like he’s happy to have something mundane and safe to talk about. _Small talk_ , Daryl supposes, to help them feel normal, like Beth said, once.

It still doesn’t feel normal to him. But he’s trying. 

“Gonna take it out for a rip tomorrow, probably go out with Aaron in a couple days, if it runs all right.”

“It’s great, what you’re doing with Aaron,” Maggie says, her voice soft and encouraging. “It’s a perfect job for you.”

Daryl shrugs his shoulders and grunts, uncomfortable. It’s really the only job around here for him, aside from hunting. He wants to say the truth, which is that he's doing it because he's pretty sure Beth would have wanted him to.

It's on the tip of his tongue, to ask Maggie to confirm it for him. He wants to blurt it out. He wants to say Beth’s name and make it feel like she’s still here, like they did back in that barn. He wants to ask Maggie, the only person left on earth who knew Beth for her whole life, what she woulda thought.

_Would she like this place? Would she be all right here?_

_Would she still think I was good, if she could see?_

But there’s something about the look on Maggie’s face, something frail. Something about it that says _please don’t_. 

So he doesn’t.

“Well. Night. Get home safe,” he says.

Daryl takes the steps in two long strides and sidles between them, breaking the clasp of their hands, awkward and fucking rude as ever, and he goes inside.

***

The next day, he picks up some gas from the fuel stores. The young guy on duty makes Daryl sign for it, and gets huffy when Daryl wants three gallons. They settle on two, eventually.

He borrows a bungee cord from Aaron and decides to keep his eyes peeled for extra jerry cans and hoses while he's out so he can collect his own damn gas and skip the hassle.

His aggravation fades, though, as he warms up the bike. By the time the gatekeeper on duty pulls back the heavy gate with a shrieky grind of metal on metal, he’s feeling almost excited. Almost good. 

Daryl snaps up the kickstand, balances the bike beneath him, and lets out the clutch.

The tall, steel walls fall away and Daryl twists the throttle as the burnt-out houses and the trees fly by. The wind whips tears from his eyes and chaps his bare face.

Daryl grins, shifting gears, and speeds down the highway.

The engine’s heavy vibrations and the wind batter his body, and the work of managing the bike and keeping a look out for obstacles and walkers shuts out everything else, leaving his mind quiet and blank for the first time since they arrived in Alexandria.

The bike doesn’t have a fuel gauge yet, so he can’t go too far without running the risk he won’t be able to get back. But he can make the most of what he’s got.

Daryl puts the bike through its paces, testing the roof of its speed capability. Once he’s gotten a feel for how it’s running, he slows down and turns around, taking a backroad for the return trip. He takes his time with it, weaving and bobbing back and forth across the empty road.

When he’s still a ways out from Alexandria, he passes a junction and a country store with two gas pumps out front. Keeping an eye out for any signs of walkers or people, he slows and doubles back to the store’s gravel lot. He drops the kickstand and grabs his crossbow off the back.

The pumps are both empty, not a drop of gas left. The store itself is locked up, but it’s easy enough to bust the glass door and reach in to unlock it. Daryl enters, his bow up as his feet crunch the broken glass on the floor. He stands just inside the doorway and reaches out to bang one hand against the side of one of the metal shelves, still stocked with dusty, sun-bleached magazines and newspapers.

A moment later, there’s a growl and a wet snarl from the back of the store, and two walkers lurch out of the hallway that leads to the restrooms.

Daryl aims and picks one of them off right away. The other starts to fumble its way towards him, around the dusty shelves. Daryl swings his crossbow around onto his back, removing his knife from his belt and stabbing the walker in the skull before it can take a swipe at him.

When he crouches down to wipe the gore off on the walker’s filthy green flannel shirt, he realises he didn’t grab his own knife. He used Beth’s. He wipes the blade carefully, then slips it back into its sheath.

Daryl stands and looks around.

The shelves around him aren’t full; the two walkers might have locked themselves in and survived on the store’s stock for a while, maybe. But there’s enough left that he’s surprised the place hasn’t been ransacked yet. With just two walkers inside, anyone could have cleared it.

Daryl pokes around a bit. He can’t carry much back with him – he didn’t even bother to bring a backpack – but he fills the pockets in his jacket with candy for the kids. He’ll tell Aaron about the place and they can return with the car for everything else. 

Behind the counter, he finds several cartons of cigarettes, and he stuffs a few packs into his pockets, too. 

The back end of the station is empty of other walkers. The cluttered office is a pig-sty, and it must have been where the walkers were staying before they turned, because there are blankets on the floor and empty cans and boxes of food all over. The office doesn’t look like it was much tidier before the turn, either; piles of bills and invoices cover every surface.

Daryl opens the top drawer in the desk, and, amongst the pens and elastic bands and a couple of old phone chargers, he finds a harmonica.

He picks it up and turns it over in his hand. He wipes the metal cover plate with his thumb, then lifts the instrument to his mouth and blows the dust out of it. His breath catches inside and a soft, harmonized scale of music comes out. Daryl holds it away from his mouth and looks at it.

_You ever learn to play harmonica, girl?_

The room is silent all around him, his unspoken question hanging there unanswered. Unanswerable.

Beth played the piano, and he's sure she mentioned guitar. Maybe she had a little silver harmonica, just like this one, back in her bedroom on the farm. Maybe Hershel used to play it himself and gave it to her.

_Stop._

He's just making shit up now.

Daryl slips the little instrument into his jacket pocket beside his cigarettes and hitches his crossbow on his shoulder.

As he rides back to the safe zone, he feels the harmonica's weight inside his pocket, against his heart, and he thinks about what he _does_ know.

He knows she loved music. He knows she was talented with it. He knows she made him appreciate a simple melody on a piano in a way he never knew he could. He knows that he spent months on the run with her, after the farm, but he didn’t really _see_ her until the night they took the prison and she sat in the firelight and sang. He knows the sight and the sound of her that night did something strange to him, a stomach-dropping, heart-pounding thing that was a lot like riding a dicey rollercoaster at a travelling fair.

Terrifying and thrilling at once.

He knows she was there, and now she’s gone, and he doesn’t understand how all of that music that lived inside her can just disappear.

Daryl doesn’t believe in magic and he doesn’t believe in heaven. He’s not sure if he believes in ghosts, or spirits, though he’s seen enough in his time to know not to be too certain of what the dead can and cannot do.

But he’s afraid that if she has a spirit, it’s trapped. He’s afraid that he trapped her when he left her warm body in the back of that car. He’s afraid that she can’t get free because they didn’t bury her. They didn’t do right by her. They should have taken her some place quiet and green where they could have laid her body to rest in the earth, the way she would have wanted. The way it’s supposed to be when a person dies. The way she once said was _beautiful_.

Instead, they left her broken body in a car in the parking lot of the hellhole that took her life. 

He put her in there himself.

_Stop._

The good, almost free feeling Daryl had when he rode away from the safe zone dies as he approaches the walls. The gatekeeper pulls back the metal gate and closes it behind Daryl when he rides in. As it slams shut, he remembers the sound of the bars back at the prison. He'd thought it was sort of funny, in a way, that after a lifetime spent avoiding it, he’d ended up sleeping in a cell, anyway.

It’s stupid, he knows. Alexandria isn’t a prison, and neither was the prison, actually, not at all. But he feels confined all the same.

Daryl rides to Aaron’s, ignoring the frowns and stares of the people on the sidewalks.

He parks inside the garage and kills the engine. As he’s wiping the road dust and bug guts off the bike, Aaron comes out of the house.

“How’d it go?”

“Not bad. Found a country store on the way back. Ain’t big but it was locked up tight. Plenty of supplies, still. We oughta move on it soon, if we’re gonna.” Daryl hands over the candy. “For the kids.”

Aaron takes the candy from him and gives him a look.

“You could take this to Olivia, you know. I bet she’d love to thank you herself.”

Daryl shrugs, uncomfortable.

“Nah, I’m good.”

Aaron doesn’t push. He just nods, and they go inside to plan a run with the car. 

The sun has set by the time he leaves Aaron’s. He’s late for dinner at Rick’s. When he gets in the door, the whole group is there, and everyone's nearly finished eating. He fills a plate with what’s left and finds a free spot over by Noah, near the window.

Everyone’s busy talking, and his arrival goes mostly unnoticed, though he catches Maggie and Glenn both smiling at him, and Carl gives him a little nod from where he sits at the table, helping Lil’ Asskicker eat.

In the kitchen, Tara and Rosita are cleaning up, starting to wash dishes. They're screwing around a little, laughing and carrying on, and they start singing some song Daryl doesn't know but which seems to crack them up.

It's annoying as hell, really, except there's no reason at all that they shouldn't have fun whenever they can and sing as loud as they want. They're not hurting anyone, and it's hardly their problem that he's a grumpy fuck.

Daryl shovels his food into his mouth and tries to tune them out.

"Beth used to sing all the time.”

Daryl stops chewing and turns his head to stare at Noah. He swallows, his throat tight.

" _What_?"

"At Grady. I worked down in the laundry so I wasn’t always in earshot. But I still caught her plenty of times. Just mopping the floors, singing away to herself. She told me she used to want to move to Nashville, before. Get gigs at bars, try to be a star."

Daryl stares, unable to make his mouth form even the most basic response. He’s got absolutely nothing.

“She was good. I dunno if she really would have made it big,” Noah says, a sad smile crossing his face. “But I know she sure as hell would have tried.”

Daryl feels jealousy the likes of which he's never experienced before that _this fucking guy_ gets to have a good memory of her. But he's also pathetically grateful that Noah's decent enough to open his mouth and share this tiny crumb of her with Daryl.

He wants to ask Noah if he remembers anything else about her. If there are other things he knows about Beth. If he has more of her hidden away that he can share.

_Tell me everything you know about her. Anything. Say her name. Please._

But he can’t say those words. He can’t figure out how to ask for what he wants in a way that doesn’t sound completely fucking nuts, so he doesn’t.

“Yeah,” he says, instead. “Yeah, she woulda.”

Noah nods, and goes back to his food, and neither of them says anything more.

That night, Daryl sits on the front porch long after everyone's left and gone to bed, and the street is dark and silent. He sits and rations out one cigarette for himself. He smokes it as slowly as he can, and then he holds the harmonica up to his mouth and just breathes through it, the sound getting richer as his breath warms the instrument up.

It sings a soft, strange little song on every inhale and exhale.

After a while, he puts it back in his pocket, and listens to the night sounds in the neighbourhood, and from the woods beyond, and he thinks about Beth and Nashville.

Noah dies two days later.

***

Things fall into a kind of routine.

Daryl rides out with Aaron a couple of times a week and they look for people and supplies. They find both. Whatever and whoever they can fit in Aaron’s car, they bring back with them.

Their best finds have been an abandoned semi full of canned food and a pediatric nurse named Rebecca, who was so thrilled to see living people that she threw her arms around Aaron’s neck and sobbed.

Daryl eats at Aaron and Eric’s a couple of times a week, but he tries not to overstay. They never let him feel like a third wheel, exactly, but he reckons they’d rather have their privacy. Anyway, Carol and Michonne get nosy when he doesn’t show up for dinner at Rick’s too many nights in a row.

The days that they don’t go out on supply and recruitment runs, Daryl gasses up the bike and goes hunting. Sometimes he goes out on foot to save fuel, and because getting up before dawn and walking in the woods until his legs ache usually means he’ll actually sleep through most of the night.

When he brings back his third deer in as many weeks, he notices a couple of Alexandrians smiling tentatively at him as he walks down the street with the doe slung on his aching shoulders.

The redneck with a crossbow and a noisy motorcycle is off-putting until he brings in food. Same as it ever was. 

Daryl spends the afternoon processing the deer in Rick’s garage, and he delivers all the meat to Olivia at the inventory. She grins at him, and says something about how she’s learning to make deer sausage. She doesn’t even seem to mind that his boots are filthy or that he drips blood and sweat on her nice clean floor.

Later, he takes the longest shower he can tolerate, and he watches all the filth swirl down the drain.

Daryl stays at Rick’s for dinner. It’s not everyone, tonight; most of the group are elsewhere. Just Rick and the kids and Michonne and Carol and him. Carol makes dinner, and for once they manage to fit everyone around the dining room table.

The rest of them make small talk while everyone eats. Daryl mostly tunes the conversation out and watches Judith attempt to eat little pieces of pasta and peas and chicken off of her tray. About two thirds of her food ends up on the floor or her lap.

“She’s getting way better at it,” Carl says, smiling at him from where he sits beside Judith.

Daryl’s skeptical, but as he watches Judith determinedly pinch a piece of pasta between her thumb and forefinger and bring it to her mouth, he has to admit that Carl’s right. She’s growing and changing, in spite of everything she’s been through, and it’s kind of mind-blowing to see.

Beth would have been thrilled. She would have been right here, watching it all and helping Judith along at every step.

_Don’t._

Daryl looks back down at his plate and finishes the rest of his food.

“Heard you’re making a name for yourself around here.”

It takes a solid twenty seconds of complete silence for Daryl to realise that Rick is talking to him. He looks up to see everyone at the table looking at him. Everyone except Judith, who’s finished eating, and is scraping up handfuls of food in one hand, holding it out over the edge of her tray, and watching all the bits drop to the floor. 

“Huh?”

“Hunting, bringing folks and supplies in. People tend to notice that kind of thing.”

Daryl shrugs. “Gotta keep busy.”

Rick watches him for a moment, unspeaking, and then shares a look with Carol. Daryl glances at Michonne, who’s watching the entire exchange in that careful, measuring way she has, a deep crease between her eyebrows.

Daryl’s skin crawls. Rick and Carol have been talking about him, he can _feel_ it, and even though they haven't included Michonne in their plans for taking over Alexandria, it's clear that she knows something’s up. She’s not stupid, and she knows Rick. Maybe better than any of them do.

But no one says anything, and Carl’s watching all of them.

Daryl looks down at his empty plate. He hates this. All this secretive bullshit and sneaking around. It’s exhausting and pointless, so fucking _stupid_ , and he wishes Rick and Carol had never talked to him about any of it, seeing as they obviously don’t trust him enough to really involve him, anyway.

Judith begins to fuss, pushing at her tray and whimpering as she looks up at Carl.

“I think she wants a bottle,” Carl says, reaching to unbuckle the straps holding her in the highchair.

Daryl pushes back from the table and stands, nearly knocking his chair over.

"I got it," he says, coming around the table and scooping Judith into his arms. He takes her to the kitchen to warm up a bottle of formula.

Judith squirms and fusses in his arms as he waits for the bottle to warm. She rubs her little fists into her eyes and frowns at him, whining a bit.

Poor kid should be off formula by now, but she wasn’t fed regular after they lost the prison. Without a cow around to provide milk, the doctor figures it’s best to keep her on infant formula for as long as she’ll take it.

When the bottle’s warm, Daryl grabs it and heads upstairs to Judith’s room. He could feed her in the living room, but fuck it. He doesn’t want to be anywhere near whatever bizarre conversation is happening now, where everyone is no doubt pretending that something completely different is going on than what’s actually happening.

_Fucking exhausting._

Daryl leaves the door to the hallway open rather than turning on a light.

He settles back into the rocking chair, Judith's head cradled in the crook of his elbow, and he tucks the bottle into her open, eager mouth.

Judith whimpers a little, then quiets, staring up at Daryl with wide eyes.

Daryl pushes off the floor a bit with one foot to rock the chair. Judith eats contentedly, watching him, and he finds that the motion soothes him, too.

Looking down at her, he thinks about the first time he held her. 

Daryl remembers the warm, soft skin of Beth’s arms brushing against his as he passed the baby back to her. He remembers how Beth smiled, her eyes bright, looking at him like he'd done good. Like _he_ was good. Like he mattered.

He looks at Judith and wonders who will tell her. Who will tell her about Beth Greene, the kind and gentle girl who took on someone else’s newborn baby without a complaint? Whenever Judith cried, Beth was the one who had known what she needed. Even Rick, unsure and broken and seeking help, had looked to Beth when Judith cried.

Judith lifts one pudgy hand and rests it against her face, stroking her hair as she continues to stare up at him.

"You remember Beth, Lil' Asskicker? She was the one with the long hair you liked to yank on. ‘Member that, sweetheart? She used to walk you up and down the cell block, day 'n night, singin' to you."

Judith just gurgles and grins, and grabs a handful of the scruff on his chin.

He wishes he had more to tell her. That Beth was kind and good isn't enough. It doesn't begin to explain everything that she was. He doesn’t know how to help Judith love her, and remember her, and keep her from disappearing completely.

There’s no grave for Judith to visit. At least they’d put out a marker for Lori, though there’d been nothing left of her to put in the ground, and they’ll never return to it, anyhow.

Beth didn’t get a marker. She didn’t even get a grave. She got the backseat of an abandoned car in a parking lot, like she was a walker. Like she was trash. Like she didn’t even matter.

“You loved her. You won’t remember it, but you did. And she loved you.”

A floorboard creaks in the hallway, and Daryl looks up to see Michonne standing just beyond the doorway, almost hidden, but not quite. He doesn't need to ask to know what she heard. His face heats.

They stare at one another for several long beats, and then Daryl lets his gaze drop back to Judith. She’s nearly done the bottle, already, and her eyelids have grown heavy. She shifts against him, cuddling deeper into the crook of his elbow.

Michonne leans in the doorway and watches them.

When Judith finishes her bottle, Daryl stands carefully, trying not to disturb the dozing baby. Michonne holds her arms out.

“I’ll change her and put her to bed,” she says, her voice soft. Daryl nods and passes Judith over, her head lolling gently onto Michonne’s chest. He steps away to leave the room.

But Michonne reaches out and lays her hand on his forearm, stopping him. Her touch is light, but even so, it takes all of his self-control not to shake it off. She tilts her head, catching his gaze.

"You're right,” she says, removing her hand to lay it on Judith’s back. “Someone should tell her. Someone should make sure she knows."

Daryl grunts, shrugging one shoulder.

“Don’t matter.”

Michonne’s eyes rake him over. She sees right through him, he’s sure, and he feels like she's got him at the tip of that sword of hers, except for how gentle she’s being.

Somehow, that’s worse. He swallows a lump in his throat and blinks back the stinging in his eyes.

“It matters,” she says. “It matters now more than ever.”

Daryl nods, watching as Michonne looks down at Judith, cradling her head over her heart. 

“Kid’s lucky she’s got you," he says.

Michonne’s brows draw together and she purses her lips, and suddenly Daryl sees that he’s not the only one who’s struggling to keep it together. Right now, and maybe in general. He’s not the only one struggling with their family and this place. He’s not the only one _trying_.

“She’s important to a lot of people,” Michonne says.

“Yeah, but she’s lucky she’s got _you_.”

Michonne swallows, and looks away from him, back down at the baby in her arms, who’s relaxing deeper into sleep with every moment that passes, completely unaware of the two grown adults trying not to fall apart right in front of her.

Lil' Asskicker's had a few mothers. At least one of them is still here.

Daryl turns away and goes downstairs, stopping in his room for his lighter and a pack of smokes, and heads out to the porch.

It’s a cool evening, and it feels good when the air hits his face and fills his lungs. It feels even better when he gets a cigarette lit and some smoke inside him. He stands at the porch railing, looking out at the street, and waits for his hands to stop shaking.

He's halfway through his smoke when he sees Maggie walking up the sidewalk.

She stops when she sees him and offers a tentative smile. She comes up the steps and stands beside him, glancing back down the street before letting her gaze settle on him.

"Hey."

She sounds tired, the kind of tired that has nothing to do with how much sleep a person's gotten, and everything to do with what they're living through when they're awake.

"Hey," he says, bringing his cigarette to his mouth. "How're you doin'?"

Maggie shrugs. "Hangin' in there, I guess."

“Glenn all right?”

Maggie’s face goes a bit slack, and she crosses her arms over her chest. Standing this close to her, Daryl can see there are lines beside her eyes that weren’t there a few months ago.

“All right as he can be, I guess. He’s… It’s been hard. Since Noah. It was bad.”

“Yeah. Could tell. He was all right, Noah.”

“He was. When I found out he was friends with Beth, I knew he had to be.”

Daryl nods and looks down at the painted boards beneath his feet. He cups his cigarette to his mouth again and takes a hard drag, exhaling it out one side of his mouth, away from Maggie.

“How about you?” she asks. “Are you all right?”

When Daryl glances up, Maggie’s head is tilted as she searches his face, and there’s something in there that reminds him of Beth. The shape of her eyebrows or the angle of her head. Or the question itself, which is exactly what Beth would ask, of course. He swallows the lump in his throat.

“Dunno. Fine, I guess.”

Maggie nods, still examining his face, her eyebrows drawn together. It’s not concern for him, or it isn’t _only_ that, at least. There’s a question that’s gone unasked. It’s the same with Rick and Carol and Michonne. They don’t ask it, but he can see that they want to.

_What happened with you two, out there?_

No one’s ever come right out with it. Maybe they’d rather not know. Maybe it just doesn’t matter, anymore, to anyone but him. He’s not sure if he wants them to ask or not. He’s not sure he wants to tell anyone how it was between the two of them, out there on their own.

He’s not sure he knows how it was, or _what_ it was, himself, and he's damn sure he'd fail to explain it in a way any of them might understand.

Anyway, it doesn't matter.

“Wanna know what bothers me?”

Maggie blinks, the line between her brows deepening. She nods for him to go on.

“How we left her.”

Maggie’s throat works as she swallows. She gives a tiny shake of her head, but now that he’s opened his mouth, it’s like he can’t stop the rest of it from tumbling out.

“Can’t stand how we left her. A fuckin’ _car_? We shoulda –”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Maggie says, shaking her head harder and taking a step back from him. “Please don’t. There’s nothing we can… Daryl, I… I can't. I just _can't_."

Maggie looks away from him, out at the dark street. She shakes her head again, her mouth a thin, firm line. After several moments of silence, she speaks.

“I have to keep movin’ forward, or else… Or else I’m afraid I’ll just fall apart. If I think too much about it. About _them_.”

That, he gets. He hates to hear her say it, but he does get it.

Daryl looks down at the forgotten cigarette burning down between his fingers. He holds it to his mouth and takes a drag so deep that his eyes water.

“Yeah,” he says, once he’s emptied himself of the smoke. “Best not to, then.”

"I need to talk to Rick," Maggie says. Her voice sounds rough, and it shakes. "He still up?"

"Mm."

Maggie turns away to go inside, but stops at the door.

"I'm sorry, Daryl," she says, so quietly he could almost have missed it.

"Don't worry 'bout it."

Maggie lingers a moment longer, and then goes inside, the screen door easing shut silently behind her.

Daryl leans forward, resting his hands on the painted porch railing. He closes his eyes, and they sting.

 _Fuck_ , he's tired. He's so goddamn tired.

When he opens his eyes, he sees the nub of cigarette still burning between his fingertips, and he thinks about it. About pressing it to his skin, feeling the sudden shock to his nervous system.

He thinks about the worms and the dirt.

Daryl lifts the cigarette to his lips and sucks hard, hitting the filter. He mashes it out against the clean white paint of the porch railing, then flicks it into the shrubs beyond.

He goes inside, into his room, and goes to bed.

***

Daryl gets up early, before it's light out. He decides to go on foot rather than risk waking Aaron up with the garage door and the bike's engine.

He needs to go outside the walls and he doesn't want to talk to anyone.

He grabs a fresh pack of smokes. He's got his knife and Beth's, and he's got enough bolts. His bow's clean and greased and ready. He's in the kitchen grabbing food to bring when he hears a creak on the stairs and Rick appears in the kitchen doorway, a sleepy-looking Judith in his arms.

As soon as Judith sees Daryl, she squeals and swipes at the air in his direction.

Rick looks at him, his brow furrowed.

"You goin’ huntin'? You were just out yesterday."

Rick says it in that tone he gets sometimes. More often than not, these days. It’s a tone Daryl knows well. A tone that says _where you boys headed?_ , like Rick’s about to ask him for his license and registration. Daryl bristles.

“Yeah, well.” He shrugs, opening the cupboard beside the fridge. He grabs a can of baked beans and shuts the door, then takes a spoon from the drawer. “No such thing as too much to eat.”

Rick nods, and goes to warm a bottle of formula for Judith.

“Still. It’s not all on you. You don’t have to go out every day.”

“I know I don’t.”

Rick leans his hips back against the edge of the counter while Judith’s bottle warms. Judith squirms, trying to turn around to see Daryl, who stands there with his beans and spoon in hand, waiting for Rick to finish whatever this is so Daryl can leave.

“Listen,” Rick says, his voice soft. “Been thinkin’ about Tyreese and about Beth.”

Daryl freezes, his stomach plummeting to his knees. 

“They’ve got the cemetery, here, and the memorial wall.”

_Michonne said somethin’._

“You wanna see if we can put up a marker for her, here? I'm sure it'd be no problem, and Maggie would –"

"No,” Daryl snaps, taking a step back, trying to fight the urge to run from the room. “ _Fuck_."

Rick blinks at him, and Daryl can tell this isn’t the reaction Rick expected at all. Something furious and ugly rises like bile in Daryl’s throat, and he’s suddenly enraged. Absolutely fucking enraged at all of them for trying to _manage_ him.

"If you want a marker for her, talk to Maggie about it. Nobody here'll give a shit; they didn't even know her. _I_ don't give a shit."

Judith whimpers, pushing at Rick’s chest and turning around to stare at Daryl. He inhales tightly and shakes his head.

“Just leave it alone,” he says, trying to keep his voice low. “Leave me be.” 

Rick stares him down, eyebrows drawn, looking like he's deciding whether he wants to put Daryl in his place. But his expression eases and he nods.

"All right. I get it."

Daryl just looks at him, his back still up.

“Am I free to go, Officer?”

Rick levels a look at him that sends a pulse of actual fear across Daryl’s nerves. He’s pushing it, now, and Rick’s barely tolerating it. It’s an old, familiar feeling, like the crackle in the air before a thunderstorm, realising he’s overstepped and is about to get his ass beat. They stare at each other for several long seconds, and then Daryl flinches. Rick clears his throat.

“Be safe out there,” Rick says, his tone careful and his gaze never leaving Daryl’s. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Daryl grabs his things and turns away. He heads outside, shrugging his jacket and vest on before shouldering his bow. It’s cool out, and, though the sun hasn’t risen, the darkness of night has faded away. The pavement is damp with dew, and mist hangs over the lawns.

He tries to get a rein on his anger as he walks, but when he passes the memorial wall, it rises again, fierce and spitting like a cat.

 _A fucking_ marker, _like that’d fix anything._

Daryl left her in the back of a fucking car. She’s there right now, bloated and rotting, maggots in her blood-matted hair.

A marker over an empty grave won’t change that.

The gatekeeper lets Daryl out without a word.

Daryl walks down the main road out of the safe zone a ways before ducking between two burnt-out houses. He walks beneath the trees, the breeze sending waves of dead leaves down around him as he heads for the series of snares he has set out in the woods. 

The first few are empty but still set. When he gets to the fourth snare, he stops ten feet away and crouches down behind a large bush. Ahead, two walkers are ripping apart a rabbit that must have gotten caught in the snare.

Daryl lifts his crossbow to aim, but he pauses, watching the walkers for a moment.

He sets down his crossbow and stands, pulling out his knife. He emerges from behind the bush and whistles, short and sharp. The walkers' heads both snap around to look at him. Growling, they wobble to their feet and advance on him, awkwardly stumbling across the forest floor.

"C'mere, you ugly piece of shit."

Daryl lets the first walker get within swiping range before he kicks it hard in the chest and sends it tumbling down against the rough trunk of a tree. The walker snarls as its companion comes at Daryl, trying to grab for his arm.

Daryl kicks that one away, too, and it goes down, sprawling in the leaves.

The first walker is back, clawing for him, growling, and Daryl kicks it again and tackles it, jamming his knife messily into its eye socket.

The other walker comes at him, but he rolls away from it and gets to his feet, grabbing it by the long, ragged coat it wears and sending it headfirst into the trunk of the nearest tree with a wet crunch. The walker collapses. The impact breaks its neck or maybe its spine; it's an inhuman jumble of odd angles as it struggles to stand again. Daryl boots it in the side, knocking it down once more, then kicks it in the chest and the face, again and again, his boot tearing flesh and breaking bones, making a gory mess of the walker.

He's still kicking the shit out of it when he realises he's sobbing out loud.

Daryl stumbles back, disoriented. The walker is a broken mess, but it still gurgles, still twitches with the desire to come at him. Daryl takes his knife and stabs the walker in the side of its head, and it finally stops moving.

He sits there with his knees in the damp dirt, his filthy, bloodied hands in his lap, his breath still hitching with sobs.

She'd be so disappointed in him.

He catches his breath and swallows, and he manages to stop crying, at least.

Daryl raises a shaking arm and wipes his sleeve across his face, trying to wipe away the blood and tears and snot.

He stares, detached, at the disgusting mess in front of him. It happened so quickly. He doesn’t remember deciding to take it that far; it just happened. Like before, back when Merle was around, how things _just happened_ and Daryl was never in control of any of it.

The walker's face is a caved-in pulp of blood and torn flesh and broken teeth, its fractured skull leaking rotting brain matter onto the ground.

Daryl's stomach turns over and he closes his eyes.

 _Fuck_. Her skull. Her broken skull cradled against his arm. The blood pouring out of her all over the floor and all over him. The desperate thought he suddenly remembers having, that if they could just stop up the hole in her head, stop the gush of blood from her, she’d be okay.

He remembers. _God_ , he wishes he could fucking forget.

Daryl takes a few deep, steadying breaths before opening his eyes again. Around him, the woods are quiet. A few birds, nearby, calling to one another, and the light wind blowing through the trees. But other than that, it's just quiet.

He looks back down at the walker, and exhales a shaky breath.

At least she's not one of these things.

At least the bullet went through her brain. At least he didn't have to jam his knife into her skull. It would have been him to do it, he knows; nobody else could have done it. Nobody else would have been able to.

At least she was spared that, and so was he.

Daryl wipes his knife off on a handful of dead leaves. Cleaning his hands as best he can, he gets to his feet. He goes back and retrieves his crossbow from where it lies amongst the leaves. Sliding his knife back in its sheath, he continues walking deeper into the woods.

He walks until the adrenaline cranking through his body dies down. He walks until he feels calm and blank and empty again.

He walks until he hears the sound of running water.

He follows the sound through the bush until he comes into a small clearing. The fallen trunk of a large tree bisects his path, and a couple feet beyond it is a low heap of dark rock, where a spring bubbles out of the ground. Bright water flows out from between the rocks and into a clear pool in a bed of gravel, no wider than two feet across.

Daryl leans his crossbow against what’s left of the tree’s stump and sits down an arm’s length away, on the trunk. He leans his elbows on his knees, and he watches the water burble up from the earth and gather before seeping slowly into the forest floor.

The breeze rustles the dry leaves and touches his face. Squirrels chatter at him from the tree canopy. 

It’s nice here. It’s good.

Daryl pulls out the can of beans and the spoon he grabbed from the kitchen before leaving, and pries the can open. He sits and eats the beans, watching a couple of songbirds swoop down from the trees to bathe in the pool.

He’s finished his beans and is just watching the birds when a deer steps between two pines and enters the clearing.

She moves silently, without disturbing the leaves beneath her tiny hooves. She doesn’t seem to have noticed him; she picks her way carefully through the clearing to the spring without looking at him at all.

He doesn’t go for his bow. She’ll spook before he can aim it. She’s young, anyway, and on the skinny side; wouldn’t do to kill her now. He’d rather leave her be. Give her a chance to find a couple of bucks to fight over her, maybe even make it through the winter and have a little fawn in the spring. 

So instead of picking up his bow, he stays absolutely still and watches her as she approaches the spring and bends her long neck down to the water.

The doe drinks deeply, her dark nostrils flared wide. After several moments, she flicks her tail and huffs into the puddle of water. She lifts her head and looks at him, focusing on him properly for the first time, her ears flicking nervously. She stares, her dark eyes enormous, before taking two steps backwards. She turns away, then, and walks swiftly back into the cover of the trees.

Daryl’s alone again.

He looks down at the empty can still clutched in his hand, the spoon in his other. The lines in his hands and the beds of his nails are crusted with dried walker blood. He'd wash them off, but it would feel too much like tainting the spring and its perfectly clear pool. But the questions he’ll face if he goes back like this and someone sees him make his stomach ache. He scoops up a can full of the cold water and does his best to rinse most of the blood off.

When he’s done, he tosses the can away into the bushes, and he rests his elbows on his knees. He watches the spring flow, the water sparkling in the sunlight.

He wishes Beth was here so he could show the spring to her. So he could just point at it without speaking and watch her face go curious and then soft. Watch her smile and _understand_ , like she always did.

He just wishes she was here, and he still doesn’t understand why she’s not.

She was tough and brave and she _made it_. Tougher and braver than most of the clueless, sheltered dumbasses tucked away behind the safe zone walls.

It doesn’t make any sense. He just doesn’t understand. They were so close. He _had her_. She saw him, he touched her shoulder, she was walking away, right by his side, and then it all fell apart.

Why?

Why would she do something _so fucking stupid_ when he was right there? When they were so close?

He knows why: because something mattered to her. Something he can't know, now. Something mattered more to her in that moment than him, than Maggie, than her own freedom. Just like finding a _damn drink_ mattered. Just like burning a cabin down mattered.

 _Stupid_. It's fucking stupid. She was stupid. Just another stupid dead girl who couldn't keep her shit together long enough to just let them fucking rescue her.

Then again, he's stupid, too. He's the one who opened a door to a whole herd of walkers without even looking, all because she had him all tongue-tied and breathless. He’s the one who let himself depend on her, who let himself need her and love her. He’s the one who let himself hope.

So they're both stupid, but she's dead and he's here, and there's no rhyme nor reason to a single fucking thing that happens.

Daryl sits there until his legs go numb and the sun begins to sink towards the horizon. He walks back to the safe zone, his eyes dry and his mind empty and blank. He doesn't talk to anyone when he returns.

He takes a shower and scrubs the blood out from under his nails. After, he smokes a cigarette on the porch, and then he goes to bed.

That night, he dreams of a house on fire.

He stands in tangled grass up to his knees and watches the house burn, the smoke thick and dark against a starry sky. The heat of the flames is strong enough to scorch his bare skin. He doesn't step back, he just lets it redden his face and singe the hair on his arms. He lets himself feel it.

She's here. He’s never dreamed of her before. He can't see her but he knows she’s here, somewhere, just out of sight. Just out of reach. She's watching the fire, too. He can _feel_ her.

The dream changes. 

There's a bridge that shines silvery-white in the morning sun. A pink sky and clouds like melted Creamsicles. White-winged birds flocking together, rising up to glide as one on the wind.

Boots on pavement and trampling through leaves, snapping branches. Fast breaths and a pounding heart. The pungent stink of fear in sweat.

Then her voice. Her clear, bright voice, echoing off concrete and iron.

_you gotta hold on, hold on, you really gotta hold on, take my hand, I’m standin’ right here, gotta hold on_

He sees the bloody smear of a handprint he left on the car window as he forced himself to say something like goodbye.

_but since it falls unto my lot that I should rise and you should not, I’ll gently rise and I’ll softly call:_

_goodnight and joy be with you all_

Daryl wakes, his breath stuck in his dry throat, and blinks up at the perfectly smooth, painted ceiling of his bedroom. Of some dead asshole’s study.

The room is dim and blue with soft moonlight. There's a crack of light under the door; someone's still up, or they got up with Judith, maybe.

Daryl holds his left hand up and looks at it.

He strokes the scar on the back and digs a fingernail in until the pain sears and brings tears to his eyes.

He blinks. The tears don’t fall.

When he sleeps again, he dreams of the grassy meadow where Aaron’s horse went down, deep in the woods. He dreams of the spring and the doe. 

He dreams of cutting the thick, green turf with a spade and digging a deep hole, a good place for Beth’s body. He dreams of finally doing right by her.

He dreams of climbing in beside her, pulling the warm, ruddy earth over them both, and never opening his eyes again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise it won't be like this forever. More soon. <3
> 
> Get at me on [tumblr](https://littlelindentree.tumblr.com/).


	3. the white thread

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Daryl Dixon Sad Potato Train has pulled into the station! This part is just wall-to-wall feelings. Sorry about that.
> 
> Thanks for my spectacular beta, M, who makes me better. <3
> 
>  **Warnings:** Some very light, brief suicidal ideation and a couple of mentions of smoking.

_And I thought then  
Of the far earth,  
Of the spring sun  
And the slow wind,  
And a young girl,  
And I looked then  
At the white thread._

_Hunting the minotaur  
I was no common man  
And had no need of love.  
I trailed the shining thread  
Behind me, for a vow,  
And did not think of you.  
It lay there, like a sign,  
Coiled on the bull’s great hoof.  
And back into the world,  
Half blind with weariness  
I touched the thread and wept.  
O, it was frail as air,  
And I turned then  
With the white spool_

_Through the cold rocks,  
Through the black rocks.  
Through the long webs,  
And the mist fell,  
And the webs clung.  
And the rocks tumbled,  
And the earth shook._

_And the thread held._

From “The Return” by Mary Oliver

**iii: the white thread**

The high school is a squat brick building set back behind a sprawling, overgrown lawn and a wide parking lot.

Glenn’s crew had gone on a supply run to a Costco and brought back information about potential survivors holed up at a high school. Daryl and Aaron headed out to check it out the following morning.

They follow Glenn’s directions to the Costco, located in a big-box shopping complex near a Target, and to the high school a few blocks away. They park the bike and the car down a shady back lane nearby before continuing on foot. 

Goal posts peek over the flat roof of the school from the football field beyond.

“Think we should find a spot to watch for a while, try to pick up some sound?” Aaron asks, eyeing the building warily.

“Nah.” Daryl shakes his head. “Glenn said they went into the school. They could hide out for ages in there, and we’re not gonna pick up no sound, neither.”

Aaron nods, somewhat grudgingly, and they continue.

The parking lot is littered with abandoned cars and scattered heaps of trash and debris. They pick their way through it until Daryl’s eyes land on something that makes him stop short.

It’s an old, grey Cutlass, both of its rear doors hanging open. The pavement beside it is stained with rusty, dried blood.

Daryl’s jaw aches and his mouth fills with saliva. There’s a high-pitched, tinny whining in his ears.

“You okay, man?”

He glances to the side to find Aaron watching him. Daryl swallows hard, inhaling deeply to try to ease the nausea that churns in his stomach. He manages a stiff nod, and carries on to the building ahead.

They climb the concrete steps up to a pair of heavy steel doors. They’re closed, but unlocked, and no one’s barred them or otherwise shored them up.

Cautious, Daryl eases one of the doors open and leans in. The hallway inside is empty and silent, lit only by the cool mid-morning sunlight that slants in through the high windows.

They enter, closing the door behind them. Aaron hands Daryl a flashlight and they walk silently down the long corridor.

The classrooms they pass are empty. Daryl shines the flashlight’s beam inside each one. All of the outward-facing windows have been papered over, and the desks and other furniture have been broken down or removed completely.

Halfway down the hallway, Aaron makes a quiet, aggravated sound in his throat.

"Ugh, even now, just being here makes me feel sick to my stomach," he says, shuddering. Daryl glances over; Aaron’s face is pale and pinched. When Daryl doesn't reply, Aaron raises an eyebrow. "Don't tell me you liked high school."

Daryl scoffs. 

"You kiddin'? Barely went and never finished. Hated school."

Aaron laughs softly under his breath as they pause at a closed classroom door. He peers into the room through the window in the door and shakes his head. They keep walking and Aaron sighs.

“Me too. I mean, I finished, but the hating it part – yeah. It was a means to an end for me. College. Moving away. Escaping.”

Daryl nods. He’s familiar with all of that, but not personally. Not for him. Not college and certainly not escaping.

_You got away from it._

_I didn’t._

_You did!_

Daryl sucks in a shaky breath.

_Stop._

The hallway ends just ahead of them at a cluster of administrative offices, the corridor lined with dusty trophy cases. Daryl shines the flashlight around the corner, but there’s no movement or sound down the long, windowless hallway, darker than the one behind them.

“So you never finished school?”

“Nope.”

They pass more classrooms, all of them empty, but the tile floor is dirtier here, covered in dried, muddy footprints. The prints track around another corner, to a pair of heavy doors under a sign that reads _GYMNASIUM_.

“Think this is where they live?” Aaron’s voice is quiet and tense.

Daryl holds a hand up and approaches the doors on light feet. Pressing his ear against the metal, he hears movement inside that sounds like footsteps, but he doesn’t hear any voices. Instead, he hears a different sound: growling. Snarling.

Walkers.

He glances over to see Aaron watching him closely, and his expression must give everything away, because Aaron’s face falls, and he curses softly.

“Shit.”

Daryl looks around and finds a bucket and a mop leaning against one of the walls. He goes over and grabs the mop, sliding it soundlessly through the gymnasium door handles. It’s flimsy, but it might be enough to give some curious person who ventures into the school time to think twice and get the hell out.

When he stands and glances over at Aaron again, he looks disappointed. Defeated.

“C’mon,” Daryl says, tipping his head in the direction that they came. 

“The people Glenn saw – do you suppose they were hiding out and some walkers got in, or…?”

Daryl shrugs.

“Don’t matter. They’re dead.”

Aaron doesn’t reply, but Daryl can practically feel him frowning as they walk back down the hallway.

They take longer making their way out of the building than they did coming in, ducking into every classroom as they go to check for anything useful. There isn’t much left that’s of any use, but they find a few stacks of textbooks, and they fill their backpacks with as many different books as they can carry before continuing on down the hallway.

Aaron clears his throat.

"You lost someone, didn't you?"

Daryl stops and glares at him, annoyed. It feels like Aaron’s broken their agreement not to talk about that shit. They didn’t actually have that agreement, but it feels like they did, and it’s aggravating that Aaron would just come out with something like that.

"The fuck you mean?"

Daryl’s tone is as surly as he can make it, but Aaron's expression doesn't change, and Daryl realises with faint irritation that Aaron is no longer afraid of him, if he ever was.

"I know everyone's lost someone. But what I mean is, you lost _someone_. Someone important."

Daryl shrugs, and doesn’t reply. They keep walking, the beam of the flashlight trailing over the dusty trophy case, glinting off the tarnished trophies inside.

He expects Aaron to carefully move on in that way he has, filling the silence with quiet conversation about some safer thing, like the new garden being laid out on the north side of the safe zone, or the clutch of chicks that hatched several days ago. But he doesn’t. He just lets the silence hang on and on as they walk, and Daryl realises Aaron’s leaving room for Daryl to keep talking.

Daryl chews on the inside of his cheek, more agitated with every step he takes. 

He doesn’t want to talk about Beth. 

Except he does. Of course he does. He remembers how it felt when he and Maggie talked about her that morning in the barn. How it felt for a moment like Beth was there, like she was only just out of sight. Now no one talks about her, and she feels more gone every day. More and more like she never existed at all, like she never mattered.

He hates that.

“Beth. Her name was Beth Greene.”

Aaron glances at him, but Daryl ignores him and keeps looking straight ahead.

“Greene?”

“Yeah. Greene. Maggie’s sister.”

Aaron doesn’t say anything right away, and Daryl’s insides squirm. He figures Aaron’s probably doing the goddamn math, trying to decide exactly how much of a pathetic creep Daryl is. His neck and ears go hot.

"Beth Greene," Aaron repeats. "What was she like?"

The question isn’t what Daryl expected. This is where a person usually offers whatever line of bullshit they prefer. That’s how it was, after his mom died. He remembers the discomfort on people’s faces as they mumbled how sorry they were and assured him they’d pray, like he gave a shit. The awkwardness when he'd just stare back without replying, because he never knew what to say and didn’t even want to try. The way people would move on as quickly as they could, unwilling to linger long with him and the ghost that followed him around like a cloud of smoke.

Aaron’s done something different, and Daryl has to really think about the question as he goes into one of the classrooms. There’s nothing inside but a couple of overturned desks and a stack of chairs shoved against one wall. He goes back out to where Aaron is waiting in the hallway.

 _What_ was _she like?_

"I dunno," he says, continuing down the hallway, towards the exit.

“Come on, man.” Aaron falls into step beside him. “There must be something you can tell me about her.”

Daryl shrugs.

"Tough. She was tough. Good person to have watchin' your back. Wouldn't think it to look at her, maybe, but she was."

"Your whole group is tough. What made her special?"

Daryl swallows and shrugs his shoulders again as they walk.

"She… she cared. About people. She cared a lot, and caring wasn’t just some feeling, to her. She _did_ somethin’ about it.” 

Daryl recalls that first winter after the farm. They were all still strangers, then. For the longest time the only conversations he had with Beth consisted of her stepping into his path and asking _what can I do?_ , her expression serious and determined, like it always took her a bit of courage just to approach him. 

Daryl clears his throat.

“She stepped up and took care of Judith like she was her own from the day that baby was born. She watched out for Carl. She cared about strangers. Dead ones, even. She was always the first one to take care of people, even when you were tryin’ to take care of her. She just… cared."

They reach the last classroom in the hallway. A heap of empty plastic binders sits in the middle of the floor. In the drawer of the large teacher’s desk, he finds a box of blue pens and pockets it.

"She cared about you?

"She cared about everybody," Daryl replies as they leave the classroom.

"Yeah, but she cared about _you_."

Daryl thinks of the way she looked at him on that moonlit porch, soft and tearful from the booze. The way she spoke to him. The way it felt when she hugged him even after all the shitty stuff he’d said to hurt her, to make her stop trying so damn hard to keep them alive.

He remembers the way he couldn’t dam up his stupid tears, how the instant her arms wrapped around his chest, he fell apart. He remembers how she just stood there, quiet and calm, her heart pounding against his back, and held onto him as he wept.

Yeah, she cared about him. He still doesn’t understand why she’d bother, but she did.

"We got out together,” he says. “From the prison where we was all livin’ before. It was just the two of us for a while, and it was rough at first, just barely gettin' by, but she… I dunno. She never gave up. Always believed everybody else coulda made it out, too. I didn’t, but she did, and she… She pulled me through."

_She saved me. She saved me every day._

_She still does._

They arrive at the end of the hallway, at the outer doors where they first entered. Daryl rests one hand on the handle and he stops. Aaron pauses, too, and just waits.

“We found a place,” Daryl says quietly, unable to meet Aaron’s eyes. “A funeral home. Nice place, big, already set up to keep walkers out, easy enough to defend, I thought, and… A piano. There was a piano. For her.”

Aaron just continues to watch him. Daryl’s cheeks burn.

“You loved her,” Aaron says, his voice very quiet.

Daryl bites the inside of his bottom lip as he tries to figure out what to say.

"Nothin' woulda happened, nothin’ like… You know.” He shakes his head. “But I didn't need it to. It wasn't like that. I woulda been happy just bein' with her. Just the two of us, gettin’ by. Havin’ some kinda life, there."

Saying it out loud hurts. His chest aches, and he swallows the lump in his throat.

It hurts to say it, to admit that he'd once been that hopeful, to dream for even a moment of making a life with her.

_That's how unbelievably stupid I am._

But Aaron understands. Again. He doesn't ask Daryl a single thing more, doesn’t ask what happened to Beth; he just stands with Daryl in the uncomfortable silence there in the shadowy hallway, and says nothing. 

When he finally does speak, his voice is very soft.

“Thank you for telling me about her. It’s not easy to do, but it matters. The people we’ve lost. They still matter.”

Daryl swallows again, blinking and avoiding Aaron’s eyes. He nods.

“Yeah.”

“Come on,” Aaron says. “Let’s go home.”

Aaron pushes the door open and they walk out into the bright sunshine, and begin making their way back to the car and the bike. They don’t talk, and Daryl thinks about that word.

_Home._

Daryl knows Aaron means Alexandria. He means the walls and the streets and the buildings and the people who live there. He means his own house and Eric, specifically. But when Daryl thinks of the word, there’s only a blank, greyish space in his mind where there ought to be a house. A fence and a yard. A room and a bed. People. That _thing_ he’s felt in Aaron and Eric’s house, and in the Greenes’ house.

They walk down the lane to the car and the bike. When Daryl straddles the bike, it struggles to start, and then stalls with a metallic cough. Daryl frowns and tries the starter again. It stays running this time, and the engine starts to warm up. Aaron leans his head out the driver’s side window of his car, concerned, but Daryl waves him off.

Aaron leads the way out of the lane and onto the streets, heading north. The bike’s clutch rattles noisily and vibrates under Daryl’s hand, and he frowns. He wants to hit the throttle hard and have the wind shake the tightness out of his chest, but he doesn’t. He takes it easy, instead. There are people waiting on them at home, depending on them.

_Home._

_Grape jelly_ , he thinks. All of a sudden, that’s what his brain comes up with.

 _Home_ is grape jelly and peanut butter. Warm, flat diet soda. Pickled pigs’ feet and slimy, salty canned okra. The smell of formaldehyde and bleach and melted candle wax. The soft pop of a struck match. An out-of-tune piano being played. Her voice from inside the house while he stood on the porch as the sun went down. Her back to him as he lingered frozen in the doorway and listened to her play.

Daryl hits the throttle and ducks the bike out from behind Aaron’s car. He speeds ahead, the wind screaming in his ears. He doesn’t let up until the metal gates of the safe zone rise up at the end of the road.

***

Daryl puts the bike back up on cinder blocks in Aaron's garage and wipes it down. He’s throwing the stained canvas cover over it when Aaron comes into the garage, having gone inside to talk to Eric while Daryl cleaned up. 

"Want to stay for dinner? Eric managed to talk Olivia into handing over a roast from that buck you brought in last week."

Daryl's expected at Rick's, he's pretty sure, but the prospect of sitting through another meal with Rick and Carol shooting each other pointed looks as if he's too stupid to notice is exhausting. So he nods.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'll stay."

Later, feeling full and almost sleepy for once, Daryl walks back to Rick’s in the dark to the sound of crickets rasping. He walks with his hands shoved in his pockets, staring down at the toes of his boots, until the hoot of an owl makes him lift his head. He stops in the empty street and listens. It hoots again, nearby but impossible to spot. A screech owl, he thinks. The crickets all go quiet.

There’s a long silence, and then the owl hoots once more.

Daryl cranes his neck back and stares up at the dark sky. The waxing moon is a sliver of light and the stars look like someone took a paint brush and spattered bright paint all over the sky. There are countless dots of light, more than could ever be seen before the turn, even way out in the bush, away from the city. 

Even the sky is different now.

Squinting one eye, he stretches his hand up and cocks his thumb, covering the moon completely for a moment. His gaze lands on the back of his hand.

The burn there is fully healed now. It scarred, of course, but that’s all right with him. He wants it that way, the shiny pink crater in his skin a reminder. If he didn’t have the scar, he’d have jonesed for a tattoo, and might have even been stupid enough to try to give himself one. He would have wanted a mark, a reminder exactly and only as permanent as his body. 

He has a tattoo on his right hand that he got at a party when he was 18. It was at Merle's buddy's place, the kind of party where bikers were doing speedballs in the living room and someone was doing tattoos in the kitchen with Bic pens and a pack of sewing needles. The kind of party where you'd worry about the cops breaking it up, except in that neighbourhood, nobody'd be caught dead calling the cops.

Merle opted for the speedballs, and Daryl for the tattoos.

It would have hurt more if he’d been sober or if the tattoo was larger, but it took the asshole all of five minutes to jab a little blue star into the back of Daryl's hand. It’s still there, though years of sunlight and lack of care have left it faded and soft at its edges.

The scar is better; nobody asks about a scar like that. Something stupid like a messy, infected tattoo of a dead girl’s name would stir up questions.

Daryl continues down the street to Rick’s. The porch is empty when he gets there, and there are lights on inside. He lets himself in and finds Carl sitting at the dining room table, alone. The sound of Rick’s low voice and the clinking of dishes against one another drifts through from the kitchen. Daryl hears a splash of water, followed by Michonne’s soft chuckle. 

Carl hasn’t looked up. He’s frowning down at the object on the table in front of him: the music box he found and gave to Maggie on their way north of Richmond. The one Daryl had tried to fix that night in the barn.

Daryl frowns. He’d forgotten about doing that, somehow, about sitting there in the barn, opening the box and taking the gears apart, blowing the dust and dirt out of them before painstakingly putting the pieces back together. He’d forgotten about the tiny plastic ballerina he’d held in his palm.

Maybe he needs to find some needles and ink, after all, if he’s gonna keep forgetting things that matter and remembering shit he wishes he could forget.

“Lil’ Asskicker in bed?”

Carl glances up and nods.

“Hm. How’d you get outta doin’ the dishes?”

Carl studies the music box and the tiny screwdriver he’s holding in one hand. He shrugs.

“I put Judith to bed _and_ I did the dishes yesterday. It’s their turn.”

Daryl snorts and leans against the doorframe, his hands shoved in his pockets. He gestures at the music box with his chin.

"What you got there?"

“Glenn brought it over and asked if I could fix it,” Carl says. There’s a beat and he shakes his head. “I mean. He asked if _you_ could fix it, but I thought I’d try.”

"Mm.”

Carl continues dismantling the gears. There's a long silence, and Daryl is about to awkwardly retreat to his room when Carl clears his throat.

“Are you okay?”

Daryl stares at Carl's downturned head. The kid's hair is long these days and it hangs in his face, hiding his eyes. Of course, he's not the only one getting shaggy. Rick got a haircut off that neighbour lady with the prick husband, the doctor. Daryl wonders if she gives cuts to everyone in town, or just men who linger on her porch to talk a little too long.

“‘Course," Daryl says eventually. "Why?”

“You’re just not around much. That’s all.”

Carl leans in closer to fiddle with one of the tiny gears.

It's true, Daryl hasn't been around much. He didn't mean to avoid Carl, but avoiding the group means avoiding all of the individual people in it, even if they’re at the bottom of the list of people who're a pain in his ass. Daryl pulls out the chair across from Carl and sits down.

Carl takes the gears apart and Daryl watches, conscious of his own empty hands. His fingers twitch, and he wishes he could light up a smoke right now. He leans his elbows on the table and clasps his hands in front of him, the thumb of one hand running over the scar on the back of the other.

“Glenn say what’s wrong with it?”

“Yeah. He said it plays the first part of the song, and then it just stops. It ends when it’s not supposed to end. It gets stuck and it won’t play the rest.”

“Must be something wrong with that bit, there,” Daryl says, pointing at the tiny metal drum lying on the table by Carl’s hand.

“I _know_ ,” Carl replies, a hint of defensiveness in his tone. There’s a long pause, and then he clears his throat. “How’d the run go?”

“Shitty, but not as shitty as it coulda gone. Ain’t nobody left alive there and we couldn’t get at whatever haul those people had.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah. Brought back a bunch of textbooks ‘n shit, though. Seems like you might get to take chemistry, after all.”

“Ugh. My mom would be happy about that, at least,” Carl says. He glances up at Daryl, his face abruptly looking younger than it has lately. “Sorry.”

Daryl frowns. “The hell you sorry for?”

“I don’t know. It’s like…” Carl shrugs, his voice low. “It’s like we got here and we had to leave behind everything from before. Like to have a future here we had to let go of all of it, including things we maybe wanted to keep. To remember.”

Daryl watches the top of Carl’s head until the kid speaks again.

“It’s hard. When you miss someone and you want to talk about them, but it feels like if you did, you’d be hurting someone who’s still here.”

Daryl leans forward onto his elbows and rubs his thumbs against each other. He doesn’t reply right away, and Carl doesn’t continue, or keep working on the music box. Daryl can hear cutlery clinking together from the kitchen, and the murmur of Michonne’s voice. He hears Rick’s quiet laugh.

“It’s okay to talk about her. Your dad wouldn’t mind. You know that, right?”

Carl looks up, his cheeks flushed and his eyes sad.

“I know, it’s just... It feels like everyone would like it better if we didn’t talk about any of them.” 

There’s another lengthy pause and Daryl thinks about how many people “them” really includes. How many lives have been cut away since the night Daryl and Merle happened to end up sheltering on the same ridge as Carl and Lori and Shane and the rest of them. 

Most of the people he met that night are dead, now.

Carl bends his head over the pieces of the music box again and picks up where he left off, taking the mechanism apart.

“What do you miss about her?” Daryl asks.

For several moments of silence, Carl keeps working, his eyebrows drawn together in a slight frown. Eventually his frown eases and something like a smile begins to form.

“She used to burn dinner all the time.”

Daryl snorts. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. We got to go to Krystal for dinner _a lot_.” Carl pauses, running his fingers over the little metal drum embedded with the pins that pluck out the notes. He frowns at it and passes it over to Daryl. “Think that’s what’s wrong?”

Daryl turns the drum over in his hands and examines it himself, picking with his thumbnail at some grime stuck to one of the pegs. 

“I used to come inside from playing after school and the smoke alarm would be going off and my mom would be standing in the kitchen. She’d kinda laugh and say, ‘What do you say we go get a bacon cheese and some tots?’”

Daryl knew Lori for less than a year, but the way they lived in those months left little room for any of them to stay strangers. He can picture her the way Carl tells it, hands on her hips, blowing her hair out of her eyes and smiling.

She'd have been glad to know they made it here. To know her children are living under a real roof, with people who love them. To see her baby girl's face, and to know her boy would get to take chemistry.

They'd have birthdays and holidays and summer picnics, just like Beth hoped. Just like Lori wanted.

They'd have some kind of life.

Daryl stares down at his hands, at the scar there and the faded smudge of ink, and he thinks for a moment about that party, and of his dead brother. He thinks about the little plastic ballerina and that morning in the barn.

"What else do you miss about her?"

Carl’s eyes are bright behind the fringe of hair hanging in his eyes.

He smiles and starts to talk.

***

Daryl decides to eat more meals at Rick’s, instead of arriving late on purpose just so he can eat alone over the sink before ducking into his room. He figures being around more probably counts as _trying_ , too.

A few days after he and Aaron strike out at the high school, Daryl draws the short straw on clean-up duty, and so does Glenn.

Daryl had eaten beside Carl and Judith, tuning the others out while he and Carl took turns attempting unsuccessfully to convince Judith to eat some of the bumper crop of broccoli from the community garden.

When Daryl gets to the kitchen with the last of the dirty dishes from the dining room, he finds Glenn scraping compostables off plates and into a plastic bin at his feet.

“Hey, man. Welcome to dish pit duty.”

Daryl huffs and goes to the sink, eyeing the stacks of dirty dishes beside it.

“Wanna wash or dry?”

“I’ll wash,” Glenn says, straightening up and adding the plate in his hand to the stack. He runs the hot water and adds dish soap, then stares down into the sink as it begins to fill.

“I still can’t really wrap my head around it, man. Hot water.”

Daryl grabs a clean dish towel and comes to stand beside him.

“No kiddin’. Didn’t even have it this good at the prison.”

Glenn nods, and then the corner of his mouth quirks up.

“Remember fixing up the showers? What a shitty job that was?”

Daryl exhales harshly and nods, thinking about the hundreds of rats and mice they’d killed, the filthy mess they’d had to clean up with barely any supplies, just to have a semi-decent place to shower. Daryl’s still not sure it wouldn’t have made more sense to just brick the place off and set up camp showers out in the courtyard.

But he remembers the group coming down to see the showers when the job was done, everyone’s smiling faces. He remembers Beth was holding Judith, and that she’d grinned at him and held Judith’s chubby little arm up to wave at him.

_“Judy, say, ‘thanks, Daryl!’”_

Glenn reaches in front of Daryl to put a plate in the dish drainer. Daryl grabs the plate off the drainer and gets to work.

“It was worth it, though. I was pretty sick of washing my hair in a bucket by that point.”

Daryl shrugs as he takes a step to the side to put the plate away in one of the upper cupboards.

“I guess that kind of thing bothers some of us more than others,” Glenn continues.

Grabbing a couple of dripping forks out of the drainer, Daryl glances at Glenn.

“What?”

"You're starting to look like Rambo, dude."

"Thanks."

Glenn grins. "That wasn't a compliment."

Daryl ignores him, drying the forks in his hand before tossing them into the drawer by his hip. The drainer is empty, so he just stands there, waiting on Glenn to hurry up and wash something.

“Have you met Jessie yet? She cuts hair.”

“She don’t exactly have a sandwich board out front.”

“Yeah, but she gave Rick a haircut,” Glenn says. He glances at Daryl, eyebrows raised and a smirk lurking at the corner of his mouth.

Daryl scoffs. 

“Guess she did.”

Glenn snorts a laugh and shakes his head, plunging his hands back into the sink to tackle the heap of knives in the greying water.

“Hey, guys.”

Maggie comes into the kitchen with another armful of dishes. She sets them down on the counter at Glenn’s elbow and peers over his shoulder.

“Well I can sure tell who the more efficient dishwasher is around here. If I ever open a diner, Daryl, you’re hired.”

“ _Hey_ ,” Glenn complains.

Maggie smiles and leans in to kiss Glenn’s cheek. 

“No loyalty,” he says to Daryl, deadpan. He gives Maggie a quick kiss, then grabs a dirty plate and gets washing once more. “Anyway, I don’t get why we can’t use the dishwasher. Aren’t these things, like, top of the line, high-efficiency deals?”

“Not efficient enough, according to Reg,” Maggie says with a shrug. She eyes Daryl. "Can we talk a minute? In private?"

Daryl nods, and Maggie heads out the back, the screen door gliding neatly closed behind her.

Glenn’s expression is hard to read. He nods to Daryl, then gets back to washing dishes.

Daryl tosses the dish towel on the counter and follows Maggie out onto the back porch. He finds her sitting on the top step in the twilight, her elbows resting on her knees.

It's chilly out, a hint of frost on the air. Daryl craves a cigarette, but he left his pack inside. He's standing there, still holding onto the door behind him, trying to decide whether to go back in for them, when Maggie's voice reaches him.

“I’m gonna ask you straight. What are Rick and Carol up to?”

_Well, shit._

Daryl squints out at the darkened yard beyond where Maggie sits. He’s a shitty liar, something he figures Maggie knows and is betting on.

Sighing, he goes over and sits down beside her. 

There's enough light coming from the doorway to illuminate the side of her face, and the first thing he notices is how damn tired she looks.

Daryl takes in the brick patio and the wide flowerbeds, full of a tangle of wildflowers and weeds, all of it turning brown as it slowly dies back for the season.

When he answers her, he keeps his voice low.

“What do you want me to say? They think we need a back-up plan.”

"Shit," she mutters, apparently having held out hope that whatever suspicions she’s had were mistaken. She shakes her head. "I can't figure out where Rick's head is at, and Carol… I just don't know. You've gotta help me out, here, Daryl. I thought we were all trying to make this _work_. Aren’t we?"

Daryl's stomach drops and he brings his hand to his mouth to bite at the calloused skin on his thumb. He doesn’t know how to explain what’s up with Rick and Carol. He doesn’t know how to explain that everything they’ve gone through together isn’t enough to _keep_ them together. He doesn’t know how to explain to Maggie, of all people, how they’ve all changed since the prison. Since Terminus.

Since Atlanta.

"They're tryna look out for the group,” he says, eventually. “They don’t tell me much anymore, but as far as I know, they're not exactly plannin' to kill everyone in their beds."

"Well, that's a _relief_." Maggie sounds anything but relieved. "It's bad enough that not everyone wants us here. If someone were to find out that they'd even talked about it… They've kicked people out before."

"I know."

Maggie sighs, deep and rough, and runs her hands through her hair before letting her face rest on her forearms. They sit in silence that way for a spell. Eventually, Maggie lifts her head.

“Thank you for bein’ honest with me. I appreciate that. I know that Rick and Carol are… Important. I know they’re important to you, and I wouldn’t ask if it didn’t matter.”

He nods. He knows what Maggie means by _important_. He’s just not sure he knows what that means to him, anymore. Right now, they’re so _important_ he can’t stand being around either one of them for longer than five minutes.

Sighing, Daryl wishes again for his smokes. He oughta just keep the pack in his jacket.

Maggie clears her throat.

“I meant what I said, you know. It’s great that you’re going with Aaron. You’re helping him, but you’re helping the rest of us, too.”

 _Us._ Their people, and the people who’ve welcomed them into their safe, little town. It's both, now, to Maggie. Both groups of people matter to her. 

Daryl thinks of Aaron and Eric and how hard they both try to never allow him to feel like he's intruding. To always let him know he’s welcome with them.

How already, Daryl can't picture an "us" that doesn't include them.

Something churns uncomfortably in his gut.

_It's like I said: there are still good people._

"Gotta try, right?" he says, eventually, when he can find his voice.

“I don’t know what the alternative is.”

Maybe Maggie doesn’t, but Daryl does.

The woods and the worms and the dirt.

Daryl runs his thumb over the scar on the back of his hand.

“Carl said you fixed the music box. Again.”

“Hm,” he grunts. “He did most of the work.”

“Well, still. Thank you.”

Daryl shrugs. There’s a long pause. When she speaks again, her voice is soft, hardly louder than a whisper.

"My mom died when I was little. I don't remember her all that well, just bits and pieces, and things my dad used to tell me."

He glances over and she looks away from him, out at the empty yard. 

"Beth's mom, Annette, she was my mom in most of the ways that mattered,” Maggie continues. “She never forced it, but she was always there for me. Never took it personally when I was sad or angry and I took it out on her. I could be such a brat sometimes…” She makes a sound that isn’t quite a chuckle, too low and sad to be that. “She was such a good person. My dad and I were so lucky to find her. That she came as a package deal with Shawn was a bonus. When Beth was born, things just… Well, things were about as close to perfect as you can get."

Daryl has a vague memory of standing in the Greenes' kitchen, glancing at the collage of photos held to their fridge by corny magnets. He remembers one photo of a willowy blonde woman with a ridiculously cute little blonde girl on her lap, both of them grinning at the person behind the camera. 

He remembers wondering to himself once again how he’d ended up with the kind of people who put photos of each other on their fridge.

"But sometimes I'd still get so sad, you know, because my own mom was gone and she should have… I should have gotten…” Maggie pauses for a moment, breathing tightly. “I didn't miss _her_ so much as I missed all the things that hadn't even happened yet. Things we never got to have. You know what I mean?"

He knows what she means. _Fuck_ , does he ever. It’s damn near all he can do not to think about those things.

Beth playing the piano in the church at the end of the street.

Beth teaching Judith and all the other kids how to read and sing.

Beth sitting beside him out on the porch while the moon climbs the sky and the crickets chirp.

Beth’s hand in his as he finally finds the courage to say everything he wanted to say to her, to make her understand.

_You. You changed my mind._

_You did that. You._

There’s a lump in his throat and he can’t answer Maggie. He nods his head so she knows he’s listening. 

"Annette would say to me that the heartache was good. It hurt like nothing else, but it was good, too, because it meant love was there. It showed me the space in my heart where I loved my mother, and she loved me."

Daryl nods again, swallowing hard. He thinks about the harmonica he kicked under his bed weeks ago. He thinks about the knife on his belt, digging into his hip. He thinks about Beth’s voice lulling him to sleep while he laid in that coffin, trying to keep his eyes open just so he could keep watching her. He thinks about the way she used to stand out in the prison yard at sunset, holding Judith in her arms, just swaying. 

He thinks about all of the things he once foolishly believed he’d get a second chance to say.

_You. It’s you._

“Daryl.”

Maggie reaches out and puts her hand on his, her warm palm covering the scar there.

"I hope the day never comes when I don't hurt for missing my sister, and missing all the things she should have gotten to have.” Her voice breaks and she squeezes the back of his hand. “I hope you understand what I mean when I say that I hope that day never comes for you, either."

Daryl blinks back the tears that have sprung to his eyes. Maggie, kind and decent as she is, stares straight ahead out at the yard.

After a minute, she squeezes his hand again and then lets go. She stands up and slips inside, the door closing softly behind her. Inside, Daryl can still hear people talking and laughing, Glenn’s low voice in the kitchen as he greets Maggie.

Outside on the porch, there’s only the sound of the fall breeze blowing dry leaves down from the trees.

This, right here, is what Beth should have gotten to have.

Safety. Food. A roof over her head. The goddamn hot water. Time to mourn her father. Somewhere to belong. People.

 _Her life_. She should have gotten to have her life.

It’s right here, everything as it should be except for her. Her life is here, like it’s waiting for her, like she’s not dead, but just gone.

But it isn’t true. These things that should have been hers will go on without her. She’s dead, and what was left of her is rotting away in a parking lot in Atlanta. Someday she’ll be nothing more than dust.

He’s wondered if her spirit’s trapped there, but deep down, he knows that isn’t true. She’s not stuck in that car. She’s dead and she’s free.

He’s the one who’s stuck back there. He’s the one trapped.

_You have to put it away. You have to. Or it kills you._

She _said_. He has to put it away, now, put _her_ away. To bury her the way they should have done, and carry on without her. He has to. There is no way around, only through.

It’s what she wanted. She’d tried to tell him that night, on the porch of that falling-down stillhouse, drunk on moonshine. She knew what was bound to happen and she tried to prepare him. She wouldn’t have wanted him to be like this: angry and sick with it, furious at the people she cared about because they’re just trying to live. 

She’d want him to put it away. She’d want him to try to live, too.

_Still._

Daryl stares out at the shadowy yard for a long time, listening to the wind in the trees. He watches as the bright moon disappears behind a mass of heavy clouds.

He thinks about Beth and the weeks they spent together. It’s a blur of fear and grief and rage and the monotony of surviving, mostly, but there are bright spots. There are things he still remembers, and can hold onto.

The things she said to him, her weight on his back, in his arms, and the warmth of her hand when she laced their fingers together.

The morning she woke up and calmly and firmly told him that he’d be showing her how to use the crossbow that day.

How she used to stare him straight in the eye and ask _are you okay?_ every single day.

He thinks about how she made him get up and track that first night on their own. How she kept making him get up, kept him going, even when he tried to make her stop.

She saved his life, and it would be the worst kind of betrayal to let that have been for nothing.

She wanted him to live, just like he wants her to have lived, now. She wanted that for him even as she accepted that she wouldn’t be there with him.

“ _You were right_ ,” he whispers, resting his head on his forearms, mumbling into his knees, feeling like a complete idiot. But it’s like the words have to come out of him. “You were right. They made it. They made it and I miss you. _Fuck_ , I miss you so bad. You were right.”

There’s no answer. There’s no peace or relief that comes with saying it out loud.

There’s just the wind and the bare trees, and the moon still glowing behind the clouds, and the sound of his own breath.

There’s just this moment, and the next, and the next, where he’s alive and she isn’t. There’s the plain truth that what’s left of his memories of her is all he will ever have.

Daryl sits a while longer in the darkness, watching moonlight briefly flood the empty yard before plunging into darkness once again, over and over, as the clouds cross the sky.

Eventually he stands, his legs stiff. He goes inside the house, and the porch door falls closed behind him.

When he sleeps that night, he doesn’t dream.

***

Daryl finally manages to slap together a fix that gets the bike’s clutch to stop shaking. After he figures it out, he stays at Aaron’s a while, planning a run out later that week to search for survivors. When he gets back to the house to shower, he finds Carol there, sitting on one of the couches in the living room, her stolen handgun in pieces on a dishtowel on the coffee table beside a basket full of laundry.

She’s cleaning the gun when he comes in.

“Hey, stranger,” she says.

Daryl closes the door behind him, then turns around and peers out the blinds. The sidewalk and the street in front of the house are empty. He lets the blind go.

“Pretty ballsy to clean your piece right here. Coulda been anybody, just now.”

Carol raises an eyebrow.

“They’re polite. They knock.”

Daryl leans in the doorway and shoves his hands into his pockets. He watches as Carol palms the magazine, putting the gun back together with practised ease.

“Carl got Judith?”

Clicking the magazine into place, Carol shakes her head.

“He’s at school. Judith’s upstairs. I’m on nap duty.”

“Hm.” Daryl chews on his bottom lip. He guesses Rick and Michonne are doing whatever cops do in a town of less than a hundred people that doesn’t happen to have a donut shop.

Carol sets the gun on the table and gathers the dish towel up. She stands there a moment, considering him.

“You know, I can’t talk to hardly anyone around here without them singing your praises.”

“Hm,” Daryl says again, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “So?”

Carol smiles at him. It’s a strange smile, not the kind of smile he’s accustomed to from her. It’s the smile she’s been using on the people here. The kind of smile she reserves for strangers she’s hustling. She stands up and tucks the gun into her waistband at the small of her back, flipping the hem of her cardigan to cover it. She comes closer, stopping a few feet away and crossing her arms over her chest.

“It’s good. You’re winning them over the best way anyone can. You bring food and people. Aaron trusts you. So they trust you, now, too.”

Daryl shrugs.

“Don’t you think it’s enough, though?”

She says it casually, but Daryl knows it’s not casual at all. Her mouth pulls down at its corners, and there’s a crease in her eyebrows. She’s watching him closely.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you and Aaron have brought in, what, a dozen people in the last few months? Don’t you think that’s enough?”

Daryl shrugs again. “Ain’t for me to say.” 

Carol’s brow furrows deeper and she cocks her head.

“You could stop any time you want.”

“What for?” Daryl says, shaking his head. “We got space and Deanna ‘n them want numbers. More mouths to feed, sure, but just about everybody we’ve brung in has been able to offer somethin’ we didn’t have.”

“Please. You’re not naive.”

Annoyed, Daryl rolls his eyes.

“Don’t you think they’d have some questions if I just up and decided I ain’t goin’ out there with Aaron no more?”

“We can think of something to say. They’ll believe you as long as Aaron believes you.”

"Jesus Christ,” he mutters. “You said I gotta try. So I am. But what about you? You ain't gonna give it a go, here, for real?"

She doesn't reply, her eyes distant and troubled. Not for the first time, he wants to ask her what happened to her out there. What made her decide to kill two of their own, back at the prison.

 _What happened?_ is a question neither one of them can seem to ask the other.

She lifts her shoulders and then drops them like they’re attached to heavy weights.

"I can't. I don't… I can't get comfortable. Not anymore. Not ever."

Daryl studies her. He takes in the crisp, buttery yellow collar of her shirt where it peeks out over her grey sweater, at her neat hair and the tension at the corners of her eyes. She’s trying every bit as hard as he is, he realises, but she’s trying for something completely different.

“Don’t gotta get comfortable. But you don’t gotta do this other shit with Rick, neither. You could just be here, _really_ be here. Try. See how it feels.”

Carol shakes her head and stares down at the floor.

“Daryl, I _can’t_.” 

“Hm,” Daryl says. “Ain’t ever known you to be cowardly. Guess there’s a first time for everything.”

Carol’s head snaps back up and she glares at him.

“ _Hey_. Screw you.”

“Hey, screw you, too,” he says. “Sure, they ain’t ready if something happens to this place. I agree. So we’re ready to do what we gotta do to protect it, even if they ain’t. Even if it gets ugly. The hell do you need to worry about the rest of it for? _Taking this place_? That shit’s fucked up and you know it, even if Rick can’t see it.”

“Rick’s doing what he thinks is best for the group.”

Daryl scoffs. 

“Yeah, sure. What’s best for the group is him back in uniform so he has a good excuse to throw his weight around and go stickin’ his nose in other people’s marriages.”

Carol’s expression becomes sharp.

“Pete _hits_ Jessie. Someone needs to do something.”

“Yeah, Rick wants to do _somethin’_ about it, all right.”

Carol scowls at him for a long moment, and then shakes her head.

“Michonne. She’s here. She’s keeping an eye on things. He won’t… He wouldn’t…” she trails off before shaking her head again, looking away from Daryl and down at the floor with a frown on her face.

“Yeah, well, Rick ain’t exactly bein’ subtle. All right? I know you think these people are stupid, but ain’t nobody _that_ stupid, and they ain’t the only ones gonna have a problem if you and Rick try to start shit.”

“What do you mean?”

“The people you say you’re doin’ this for, _our_ people? Carl and Maggie and Glenn? Everybody? They’re tryin’ to make a life here. How you think that’s gonna play out, huh? When you expect them to back you up against people they’re friends with?”

“Is this about Aaron?”

“No! Christ,” Daryl snaps, reaching the end of his patience. “It’s about you and Rick and what the fuck you think is really gonna happen here if you try to take this place. Both of you gotta quit this shit and use your goddamn heads.”

Carol just stares at him, her mouth hanging open, and says nothing.

Daryl goes across the hallway into his room and grabs his crossbow. He walks back out the front door without another word to Carol, only stopping himself from slamming the door behind him because Judith is sleeping, and it’s not her problem that every adult around her is a complete fucking mess.

He goes out into the woods on foot, stays out until well after dark, and returns empty-handed.

***

Fall is well underway, but the day of their run dawns sunny and clear, like one last, bright burst of summer.

They head south towards Richmond to scope out a couple of wreckers Daryl remembers passing on the journey to Alexandria. They stay off the major roads – too many pile-ups to work around – and take one of the county highways instead, out of the suburbs and through the chain of small towns clustered along the rural route.

On the outskirts of one small town, the clutch starts to vibrate and hum under Daryl’s hand. He waves to Aaron and they pull into the shade of a diner.

Aaron parks and kills the engine, coming to stand beside the bike as Daryl dismounts.

“Still, huh?”

“Yeah,” Daryl grumbles. “Fuck.”

Aaron winces and they both give the street a once-over. Across the way there’s a post office beside some houses and an empty storefront. Nearby, a four-way stop leads off to a tree-lined residential street. It’s quiet here, but there are houses to loot. Could be people holed up.

“Listen,” Aaron says, “Why don’t I go scout a bit, meet you back here in an hour or so?”

Daryl squints against the bright morning sunlight.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, might as well. I won’t go in anywhere; I’ll just scope out the houses down the side streets, see if I can spot any signs of people.”

Daryl’s face must give away his unease, because Aaron smiles.

“C’mon, man. I’ve got my flare gun, and anyway, I’m not brand new. I can handle myself.”

Daryl nods. It’s true; he can. Aaron knows what he’s doing.

“All right,” Daryl says. “Just don’t do nothin’ stupid, all right? We can ditch the bike and just take the car back if we gotta.” 

“Deal.” Aaron adjusts his backpack and checks the ammo in his handgun. “See you in an hour!”

“One hour. If you ain’t back here, I’m comin’ to find you.”

Aaron tips his head in acknowledgement and grins before turning away and heading around the corner of a low, brick building, and out of sight.

Daryl sighs. He doesn’t like it. But the shitty job he did fixing his bike shouldn’t keep them from at least trying to get something accomplished today.

Crouching down on his knees beside the bike, Daryl pulls his tool roll out of the makeshift gear bag under the seat and spreads it out on the pavement in front of him. 

He works on the engine for some time. The fix he made the other day seems to have stressed some other parts of the engine, and it takes him a while to figure out exactly what’s gotten fucked up.

_Fuckin’ carburetors._

Pulling out his knife, he trims a hose and pulls out a couple of plastic cable ties to secure it. It’s a workaround; the old carb’s days are numbered. This’ll have to do until they get back home, and until Daryl can get to a junkyard to scavenge. 

Aggravated, Daryl scratches the back of his neck and thinks about the half-full pack of stale smokes he once again left beside his bed.

His thoughts are interrupted by a sharp sound, like someone choking and crying in one painful bark. He’s on his feet in an instant, reaching for his crossbow, when he sees Aaron standing down the street.

Next to Aaron is a woman wearing a backpack and a rifle over her shoulder. She’s thin, with short blond hair, dressed in filthy clothes, her face sunburnt and stained with dirt.

Daryl goes absolutely still.

There’s something about the way she stands. Something about her height and the cock of her head and the hunch of her shoulders that makes his stomach plummet towards his knees. 

That’s all he sees before she runs.

Everything slows down, like his brain’s running at half-speed, or like he’s dreaming. He doesn’t understand what’s happening right in front of him. He distantly hears the sound of her sobbing and sees her running full-out at him, a blur of long legs and pumping arms and a bright flash of blond hair in the afternoon sun.

But it doesn’t make sense. What he’s seeing just can’t be real.

She slams into him, throwing her arms around his neck. His breath is stuck in his throat, his chest tight like it’s being squeezed in a vice.

_Beth_

It’s her.

She’s alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. <3
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](https://littlelindentree.tumblr.com/).


	4. in which darkness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! Who wants to read another behemoth chapter that is approximately 90% just people crying? Okay!
> 
> I revisited Explosions in the Sky's album [The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place](https://youtu.be/aznXne3juPk) while writing and editing this chapter, and yeah. Yep. That's the soundtrack for this fic, that whole album. Just the whole thing.
> 
> Thanks to M for the beta and for being my person. <3
> 
> Also! It bears mentioning that this is the point in the story where it dovetails with [Surfacing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5266412?view_full_work=true), and that although this fic can probably be read on its own, it's very much a companion/sequel to Surfacing and is meant to be read that way.
> 
> **Warnings:** Mind the tags! Daryl does a lot of smoking in this chapter. There's also a lot of description of Beth's scars and injuries, so, as always, please skim or skip if that will be bothersome to you.

_In the worst hour of the worst season  
of the worst year of a whole people  
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.  
He was walking—they were both walking—north.  
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.  
He lifted her and put her on his back.  
He walked like that west and west and north.  
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.  
In the morning they were both found dead.  
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.  
But her feet were held against his breastbone.  
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.  
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.  
There is no place here for the inexact  
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.  
There is only time for this merciless inventory:  
Their death together in the winter of 1847.  
Also what they suffered. How they lived.  
And what there is between a man and woman.  
And in which darkness it can best be proved._

Eavan Bolland, “Quarantine”

**iv: in which darkness**

It’s Beth. 

It’s impossible. It isn’t real. It _can’t_ be real.

Daryl watched her die. He saw the bullet explode the top of her head and felt her blood hit his face. He watched her collapse in a heap at his feet like a puppet whose strings had been cut. He carried her. He laid her warm, heavy body across the backseat of a car. He closed the doors himself and laid his palm on the hot glass.

He looked at her one last, long time, at the blood staining her hair, at her pale face, her lips tinged blue. She was so still.

That _happened_.

He must be out of his mind. He’s finally lost it completely, and _this_ girl with her arms around his neck is just some girl Aaron’s found, and she’s crazy, too, going around throwing herself at strangers. 

But then she gasps on the end of a sob, a little sound at the back of her throat that’s almost like laughter. It’s a sound Daryl knows, that he heard from Beth when they were together, that he’s heard a thousand more times as he’s combed through his memories of her. 

He’d know it anywhere.

It’s her. _Impossible_. But it’s really her.

Daryl grabs her, an arm around her body and one hand cradling the back of her head, and he lifts her against him as she clings to his neck. He tries to make his dry mouth work, tries to say _something_ to her, and he thinks maybe he does, because she presses her face closer to him and mumbles something he doesn’t understand. He feels like he could laugh and shout and cry all at once, but all his sandblasted brain can come up with is one word.

“ _How?_ ”

Beth pulls back and he sees her face properly for the first time. Her dirty, tear-streaked, _precious_ goddamn face, gaunt and red and peeling from sunburn, marked with scars. Her eyes are full of tears, and she’s beaming at him.

“I made it,” she says, like that explains how she could possibly be standing in front of him. Like that explains anything at all about what’s happening.

_They left her._

They left her unconscious and bleeding, a damn bullet hole in her head, so still and broken that they didn’t even question that she was dead.

_He_ left her.

Daryl lets go.

He takes a step back, a high-pitched ringing in his ears, and he blinks hard, noticing finally that Aaron’s standing a ways off, trying to give them space. His expression is anxious, like he’s worried he’s done something wrong. Daryl tries to tell him without speaking that it’s fine, but the most he can manage is a tight grimace.

“We should go,” Aaron says. He gestures up the street, and for the first time, Daryl sees a small herd gathered there, just milling. The walkers haven’t picked up on the three of them standing there, but they’re bound to soon. 

Daryl expects Beth to get in the car with Aaron, but she wants to go with him. She squints at him in the bright sunlight, her head cocked, and, for the first time in his entire life, he wishes he had a helmet. She oughta have a helmet.

He gets on, and she climbs carefully on behind him, scooting herself forward and wrapping her thin arms around his waist. The weight of her body against his back hits him like a punch to the gut, and for a dizzying moment, he’s sure he’s back outside that stillhouse in the sweltering heat and she’s hugging him tight, holding him together and letting him fall apart at once.

For a moment, none of the shit that’s gone down between then and now ever happened at all, and it’s just them, again, and his heart feels light, like someone’s taken all the lead weights out of it.

Daryl starts the bike and it hums steadily. They’ll get home on a lick and a prayer, but they’ll get home.

Aaron slams his car door, and the walkers up the road turn in their direction. 

“You good?” Daryl asks, sensing the nervous way she holds her weight on the bike. She’s never been on one; she’d said as much before, when it was just the two of them.

“Peachy,” she says, her voice shaky and dry but amused, too. The sound of it startles him. It’s really _her_. 

She’s not dead or gone. She’s alive and she’s right here.

Beth shifts behind him, her thighs moving against his.

Daryl grips the throttle and the clutch in shaking hands. He flips up the kickstand and pulls away as Aaron accelerates. Dodging the bike around the walkers, Daryl follows Aaron back onto the northbound highway.

White-knuckling the throttle, he stares at the bumper of Aaron’s car. Beth relaxes, eventually, once he hits a good cruising speed. She wraps her arms more tightly around him, letting her weight settle against his back.

Daryl holds his breath, sure he’s about to wake up any second and find himself staring up at the ceiling of his room. There’s just no way this can be real.

But the vibration of the motor is too heavy and the wind beats his body too hard for this to be a dream. And her hand is gripping his vest. That's real; he can feel it.

Beth exhales a deep breath and leans what feels like her cheek or her forehead against his back. He swallows the hard lump in his throat and tries to keep his shit together.

A moment later, her body trembles hard enough for him to feel. 

She’s shaking.

He takes his hand off the clutch and touches hers, wrapping her cool, chapped fingers in his own. 

The ride back to Alexandria passes in what feels like an instant.

Daryl hesitates as they approach the turn-off; he wants to keep going. He wants to ride with her arms wrapped around him until his bike runs out of gas. He wants to carry her on his back until they find some place like the funeral home, but _real_ , quiet and warm with candlelight, where they can start over. Where he can keep her safe, this time, instead of fucking everything up.

But he doesn’t, because they can’t. She has family inside those gates.

Anyway, who’s he to think she’d want to go anywhere with him? He left her.

They pull into the zone and Daryl stops the bike and kills the engine. Aaron parks the car and gets out to talk to the guy on gate duty, sending him off to find Maggie and Glenn. Daryl holds the bike upright with his weight and waits for Beth to let go of him and hop off.

But she doesn’t. Her arms stay wrapped around his middle even as her feet ease down to touch the pavement. They've stopped and she could bail, only she doesn't. She holds on like she did the whole ride, almost _hugging_ him.

Daryl swallows and doesn't move a muscle.

Then Glenn comes running down the street, and Beth finally lets go.

She gets off the bike, letting Glenn scoop her up in a hug, his eyes wide as he stares at Daryl over her shoulder.

Michonne is seconds behind Glenn. Her eyes linger on Beth, and then slide to Daryl, her expression so knowing, so stunned, that Daryl has to look away, down at the gas tank between his thighs.

Glenn takes off at a run, back towards the houses, shouting Maggie’s name, as Michonne carefully embraces Beth. The others come, and Daryl fiddles with the throttle, watching out of the corner of his eye as Beth’s surrounded.

Then Maggie comes tearing down the street with Glenn close behind, and Daryl has to look away again. He has to close his eyes and count to ten because he feels sick to his stomach.

Maggie makes a nearly inhuman sound of shock and plunges into the crowd of people.

Daryl feels a hand touch his arm and he startles. 

Carol’s standing beside the bike, looking over at Beth, watching everyone pass Beth around like she's a new puppy. 

Carol looks at him, then, her eyes wet with unshed tears. She opens her mouth, closes it again, and shakes her head. The look in her eyes is one he hasn’t seen in a long time.

She looks hopeful.

His friend’s still there, his good friend, his first _real_ friend, underneath the costume, underneath the armour.

Daryl reaches out and takes her hand. Carol smiles, and the tears spill down her cheeks.

The noisy group is still clutched close around Beth, everyone who knew her still taking turns hugging her, and the others she hasn’t met introducing themselves.

Daryl catches a glimpse of her face and his stomach sinks.

Beth’s eyes are wide, her smile strange and forced. She looks like a rabbit when it hears a twig snap, and he wonders how long she's been out there on her own. They had vehicles to get them north of Richmond, at least, but she might have walked the whole fucking way for all he knows. How long would that shit take? When was the last time she slept soundly, without watching her back? How did she feed herself out there?

How did she survive a gunshot to the head?

How did she get away from that place?

How could he have left her there, alive?

The excited voices around him fade in and out like someone’s tuning a radio inside his skull. His chest feels tight and a low buzzing fills his ears. He lets go of Carol’s hand.

Maggie’s holding one of Beth’s hands in both of hers, like a strong wind will blow Beth away, and saying something about taking Beth home. Daryl realises he’s done his part; he got her back safely to the people she loves. He’s not needed.

Daryl starts the bike and kicks the stand up. Carol says his name, but he ignores her and slowly pulls away from the gates and out onto the street. He heads to Aaron's and stows the bike away in the garage, wiping it down carefully. When he's done, he takes the crossbow off the back and slings it over his shoulder.

He stands in the open doorway of Aaron’s garage for a minute, listening to the chirping of birds in the shrubs beside the house, and, somewhere nearby, the sound of children laughing.

Aaron’s gone to let Deanna know what’s happened, Daryl guesses, but he’ll want to talk to Daryl after. Check in on him.

Daryl starts walking.

When he gets to the front gate, everyone’s gone but two women on watch. Aaron’s car is still parked alongside the wall. The women on watch open the gate without a word.

Daryl steps off the main road immediately and follows the perimeter of the wall to the east a ways before heading out into the woods.

As he walks, he thinks. He wishes his mind would quit and go blank, instead, but it won’t. Instead it races.

Beth’s been alive this whole time.

Every minute he’s been struggling to put one foot in front of the other, wanting to die, feeling _sorry_ for himself, she’s been alive, injured so badly he can’t even guess what she’s been through, fucking _left behind_ , and it’s his fault.

He _left_ her.

Beth was alive and he dumped her in a car to bleed out and die.

He could have stayed with her and helped her and instead he _left her_ in that place. She got away somehow and had to find her own way here, all alone.

Daryl’s stomach rolls over. He stops and leans one forearm on a tree for support. He tries to breathe through the nausea, but his chest is tight and all he can draw are short, shallow breaths.

She was alive. When she was bleeding all over him and he was trying to figure out how they could take her with them and bury her someplace, she was alive. She was clinging to life and he dumped her in the back of a car.

He did that.

His stomach heaves again, his mouth filling with saliva. He drops to his knees and vomits in the leaves. His heartbeat pounds in his ears and his head swims, black spots spinning at the edges of his vision.

He doesn’t know how long he stays like that, but eventually he becomes aware that his knees are aching and damp from the dirt. He inhales shakily and exhales.

Daryl’s not sure how he gets himself to his feet and walks back, but he does. 

It’s late afternoon by the time he walks up the main road into the safe zone. An older man is guarding the gate, and he lets Daryl in with a wave Daryl doesn’t return.

Inside, the streets are quiet. Aaron’s car is gone. Everyone’s inside with their families, making dinner.

She’s here somewhere. Probably at Maggie and Glenn’s. 

She’s here. She’s alive.

She’s here and he doesn’t want to be anywhere near her.

Daryl heads to Rick’s and lets himself into the house. He stands in the foyer, listening. The house is empty. He goes into his room, where he shuts the door and hangs his crossbow up on the nails he’d hammered into the drywall. His smokes are on the floor next to the bed.

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, he grabs the pack and pulls a cigarette out and holds it between his fingers. He rests his elbows on his knees and stares at the cigarette. 

He should go out on the porch if he wants to smoke. It'd be shitty of him to smoke inside, even though Judith isn’t in the house right now. 

The sound of the front door opening and closing startles him badly enough that he drops his smoke on the floor. A moment later, there’s a knock on the bedroom door. He leans down and picks the cigarette back up, sticking it behind his ear. 

“What?”

The door opens. It’s Rick.

“Hey.”

Daryl doesn’t look up from his hands right away, but eventually, he does.

Rick’s leaning in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest, watching Daryl. His face looks strange, unusually pale, and his eyes are red, like he’s been crying.

Daryl swallows.

“What is it?”

“Mind if I come in?”

“Suit yourself,” Daryl says, shrugging.

Rick pushes off the door frame and comes into the room, leaving the door open behind him. He sits down beside Daryl on the bed, leaving a hand’s width between their legs. Rick leans forward and mimics Daryl’s posture, resting his elbows on his knees. He buries his face in his hands and sighs a deep sigh.

“Hell of a thing,” he mutters.

Rick doesn’t do anything for a long time except sit there beside Daryl, his face in his hands.

Eventually, he clears his throat.

"Dinner at Maggie and Glenn's tonight. All of us, for Beth."

Daryl says nothing. Rick turns to him, watching the side of his face, but Daryl keeps staring down at his feet.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” Rick says, his voice soft and steady. Daryl blinks hard, his eyes stinging. “But you’d be missed.”

The last thing Daryl wants to do right now is eat a meal in Maggie and Glenn’s living room with the entire group breathing down his neck and gawking at Beth.

But he has to face her, sooner or later.

Rick opens his mouth a couple of times like he's about to say something, but he stops himself. Instead, he sighs roughly and rubs his hands over his face.

"Hell of a thing," he says again.

Neither of them says anything more, and they sit in silence together until it’s time to go.

***

When Daryl walks into Maggie and Glenn’s living room, Beth’s the first thing he sees.

Daryl’s grateful for how crowded the room is, because no one seems to notice him standing there just staring at her.

She’s sitting at one end of one of the massive couches, Maggie right next to her. Her short hair’s clean and shiny, curling softly around her ears, and her skin’s free of dirt. The scrapes and scars on her face stand out more than they had when they were hidden beneath the layer of grime on her skin. There are dark shadows beneath her eyes. She’s dressed in clothes that hang off her too-skinny frame, her collarbones sharp and pronounced above the collar of her grey t-shirt. There’s a plate of food balanced on her knees. She’s listening politely to Eugene while he drones on, her dinner untouched. Maggie leans over and says something to him, and he gets up and heads to the kitchen. Beth turns to Maggie and gives her a tight, grateful smile, and Daryl’s stomach aches.

He turns away, following Eugene into the kitchen. Carol’s there, serving up chicken noodle casserole. Sasha and Tara are there, too, picking up plates alongside Eugene.

The three of them troop out, and then it’s just him and Carol. She sets down the serving spoon and rests her hands on the countertop. She stares at him, her expression unreadable.

“You took off,” she says.

“Mm.” He shoves his hands in his pockets.

Carol covers the casserole with a wrinkled piece of tinfoil, smoothing the edges out. She picks up a full plate and a fork and comes around the counter to stand in front of him. She holds the food out.

“I’m not gonna ask if you’re okay,” she says softly. “But you should eat something.”

Daryl looks down at the plate of food. He can’t tell if he’s hungry or not. He must have eaten that morning before heading out with Aaron, but he doesn’t recall. He takes the plate.

Carol rests her hand on his arm, giving him a quick squeeze.

“Go on.”

Daryl turns away and takes his plate to the living room. The room’s not as big as the living space at Rick’s, and most of the seats are taken. He finds his way around the edge of the room and sits down on a wooden chest beneath one of the windows.

Beth’s right across from him, on the other side of the room. There’s about a dozen people between them, but he can see her perfectly from where he’s sitting.

Daryl crouches over his plate and starts shoveling food into his mouth while everyone else talks to one another.

They make her listen to all of their bullshit.

They’re trying to make conversation, he guesses, like people will do, trying to bring her up to speed like she’s been away at college and just come home for the summer, rather than nearly killed and left behind to fend for herself.

When Daryl dares glance up to get a look at her, he feels sick all over again.

She looks so fucking exhausted. Her smile is genuine, but her eyes are tired, and he wants to snap at everyone to just shut the fuck up and leave her be. It’s not his place, but it ought to be someone’s. Someone ought to look out for her.

Beth listens to them talk about their own journey here and life in Alexandria with patience, even though when she goes to tuck a nonexistent strand of hair behind her ear, her hand shakes.

When everyone’s finished, it’s apparently Beth’s turn, and, in halting, disjointed pieces, she tells them all _how_.

She was in a coma for five weeks. It took her months to regain her strength, but as soon as she could, she left Atlanta and headed for Richmond, figuring that they’d gone that way to take Noah home.

Daryl can hardly stand to sit there and listen to her talk about it in her matter-of-fact tone, like she’s describing having gotten a flat tire.

_Six hundred miles._

If he remembers right from their own trip out of Georgia, it’s about six hundred miles and change from Atlanta to where Aaron found her. The way she tells it, she had a truck for about the first hundred miles. She walked the rest.

She survived a gunshot to the head and a fractured skull and a coma, then she walked five hundred fucking miles to find them.

She tells the whole story, right up to running into Aaron, but there’s something in the brief silences she allows that tells Daryl there’s a lot she isn’t saying about what she’s been through.

Daryl feels sick again, the casserole sitting like a brick in his stomach. He glances at the front door, wondering how conspicuous it’d be if he went out for a smoke.

Then Carl brings Judith out to see Beth.

Carl puts her in Beth’s lap, and Judith doesn’t make strange for even a second. Her arms reach out and Beth pulls her in close, and when Daryl sees the way Beth’s eyes slam shut and her chin quivers as she tucks her head close to Judith’s, it’s suddenly too much.

It’s like all the air’s been sucked out of the room. It’s all _too much_ , and he’s on his feet, out the front door and onto the porch almost before he even knows what he’s doing. 

Outside, the evening is cool and it smells like oncoming rain. Outside, he can breathe.

Daryl reaches into his pocket and pulls out his smokes and his lighter, and it’s not until he feels the first bump of nicotine hit his bloodstream that he realises his entire body is trembling. He leans his butt back onto the railing, and smokes two cigarettes as quickly as he can.

It’s stupid, considering smokes don’t exactly grow on trees, but he does it anyway.

He lights a third, and is holding it between his fingers, contemplating whether smoking it is going to push him over the edge and make him puke, when the screen door opens.

Daryl doesn’t need to look up to know it’s her. 

“Hey.”

Beth’s voice is soft and a bit hoarse.

“Hey.”

She comes over to him, but he moves, antsy, and rests his hands on the porch railing to look out at the street and the dark, silent houses.

Beth follows him, though, and stands beside him, placing her hands on the railing next to his. She doesn’t say anything, and Daryl pulls hard on his cigarette, taking the smoke deep into his lungs. His brain buzzes from the nicotine and his heart pounds in his chest.

There’s so much he wants to say to her.

He’s spent months thinking about all the things he never got to say. Months thinking about how things might have gone different if he had.

Now that he can, now that he _wants_ to, he's tongue-tied. His mind’s gone blank, because everything he's felt in the last few months is pathetic and small beside the hard fact that she was alive the whole time and he just left her behind.

It doesn’t much matter what he wants to say. What matters is what he _needs_ to.

He's never been any good at apologies, and he doesn't know if there are words that exist for the ones he owes her.

“I wanted to take you with us,” he says, eventually, taking a drag on his cigarette to try to settle his nerves. She’s looking at him, the side of his face, but he’s not looking at her. He can’t. “Maggie, too. Neither of us wanted to leave you there. We wanted to take you out of the city, find a place for you. Somewhere green, somewhere… _Hated_ it, leavin’ you in that car in that fuckin’ place.”

Beth inhales sharply and Daryl's stomach twists. He shouldn't have lit this last smoke. He probably shouldn't have eaten, earlier, either.

He absolutely shouldn’t have just fucking told her that he’d wanted to _bury_ her.

_Fuck._

“If you’d buried me, I would have died,” she says. Her tone is so calm and reasonable that he wants to shout. “Daryl, it’s not–”

But it's suddenly like he's turned a faucet on inside himself. Or a firehose, more like.

“ _I’m sorry_ ,” he says, interrupting her. “I’m so sorry, Beth. If I’da known, if we’da known, we never woulda – we thought – Jesus Christ, I’m so fucking sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” she says, shaking her head at him, her brow furrowing.

_It's okay._

Unbelievable. Left for dead and she says _it's okay_. Like forgiveness comes that easy for her. Like any of them have earned it.

The surge of anger that rises up inside him is almost comforting. Anger is easier than anything else. Anger is familiar, at least.

“No. It ain’t _okay_ ,” he snaps, hating how his voice breaks. “Can’t believe we was so fuckin’ stupid, leavin’ you in that car when you was still alive. We didn’t check. We thought – we thought for sure – you coulda _died_ , and we never woulda even known, I never woulda – _goddamn it_.”

Just as suddenly as it began, the avalanche of words coming out of him just stops, his mouth gone dry.

He waits for her to call him a piece of shit for leaving her there. A stupid, careless fucking asshole. He’d deserve it. He wants it, really, in a strange way. He wants her to be angry at him. He wants her to chew him out. That would make so much more sense to him than the calm way she’s talking about the worst thing that’s ever fucking happened.

Instead, her hand lands softly on his where it rests on the railing. He sucks in a breath and looks over at her. Really _looks_ at her and can _see_ her better, now that she’s cleaned up, and now that his brain isn’t slow and stupid with shock.

There are dark shadows under her eyes and she’s much too thin. There's a long, pink scar on her cheek and another over her eye. He remembers her face was all fucked up, like she’d been in a bar fight, the last time he saw her alive. The worst, though, is the skull fracture, a little crater on her scalp, partly obscured by the thick, short hair that makes her look like Tinkerbell or something.

It’s too much. Just looking at her is way too fucking much for him to handle, so he looks away, and brings what’s left of his cigarette to his mouth.

Except then she touches him.

Her fingers land on the back of his hand where it rests on the railing, brushing gently over the scar there.

“What’s this?” 

That’s not a question he can possibly answer. 

He stares down at her weathered knuckles and the way she carefully traces the smooth patch of scar on his hand. He can feel her looking at him, waiting, but he doesn’t answer. He’s not sure there are words for what that scar is.

Except this is Beth, and she’d get it. Better than most would.

They’re standing alone on the porch, just the two of them in the moonlight, and he could tell her how it was for him. He could tell her how it felt to leave her behind. How it felt to have failed her so completely. How it felt like he was sleepwalking. How he couldn’t feel anything, he was so empty, until he pressed that cigarette into his skin and felt his own flesh burn.

But the words don't come.

He can't say it.

He's ashamed.

He shakes his head, and bites the inside of his bottom lip so hard that he tastes blood.

Beth slides her hand beneath his, pressing her palm to his, and then she leans down and kisses the scar.

Her lips on his skin might as well have been a razorblade. The cold butt of his cigarette drops from between his fingers and lands on the deck. His breath sticks in his throat, and before he can yank his hand back or turn away or hop the railing and just get the fuck out of there, he’s crying.

“ _Oh_.”

Daryl barely gets a glimpse of her face before she puts her arms around his shoulders and pulls him down to her. He goes, wrapping his arms around her and dropping his head to her shoulder.

It takes him a second to realise she’s crying, too.

He runs his hands up and down her back, trying to offer her some comfort. She just holds him tighter and cries almost silently into his neck, the hitch of her breath the only way he can tell she’s still crying.

He doesn’t know how long they stand there in the moonlight leaning against each other. It reminds him of that afternoon at the stillhouse. He didn’t know how long they stood there then, either. He just knew then, as he does now, that it was okay. 

It was okay to let her hold him. It was okay to just fall apart.

The only thing that’s different is that this time, they’re face to face. She’s cradling his head on her shoulder and he’s hugging her into his chest.

It feels wrong to let her comfort him. He doesn’t deserve it. But she’s holding on tightly and she’s crying, too, and he thinks that maybe this is something he can do. This is one small way that he can make himself useful, even after failing her so many times.

So he holds on.

***

Daryl doesn’t sleep that night.

He walks around town for hours after they say goodnight and he leaves Beth standing on the porch. He’s exhausted but restless, and the urge to head out into the woods is hard to fight. He does fight it, though; he knows going out there in the pitch dark is a stupid thing to do.

Also, she’s _here_. She’s inside the town’s walls, and he feels pulled in two directions, now. Pulled out into the woods, away from everything and everyone, and pulled back towards her, to where he can see her, can keep watch over her.

Not that she needs him to. Not that it's his place. But still.

So he doesn’t sleep. He walks until his feet and his back ache and he starts to feel like a dumbass, skulking up and down the sidewalks in the darkness.

Daryl goes back to Rick’s and sits on the porch until he hears the first birds begin to sing, just before dawn. The darkness of night slowly fades, and Daryl goes inside to grab his crossbow.

He checks his snares as the morning dawns cool and sunny, just as beautiful as the day before, and brings two rabbits back with him.

On his way back to Rick’s, after leaving the rabbits with Olivia, he finds Maggie sitting on the front step of Deanna and Reg’s house. She’s got her head bowed and her hands clasped between her spread knees. It looks almost like she’s praying.

Maggie hasn’t noticed him, and he’s about to keep walking when she lifts her head and shades her eyes from the bright midday sun.

“Daryl.”

He comes over and stops at the base of the steps.

Maggie just looks up at him from where she’s seated for a long moment, and doesn’t say anything. They stare at each other until finally Maggie clears her throat.

“Yesterday was so… I didn’t get a chance to say thank you. Thank you for bringing her home.”

Daryl shrugs.

“Didn’t do nothin’. Aaron found her. Anyway, she got herself here.”

Maggie nods and glances over her shoulder, back at the house.

“She’s in there with Deanna.”

Daryl looks at the closed door, trying not to scowl at it.

Deanna’s all right, really. She doesn’t mean any harm, at least, but the curious way she looks at him, like he’s a strange bug skewered on a pin – he hates that. The way she’s been looking at all of them since her son was killed doesn’t make him too comfortable, either. He doesn’t like that Beth’s in there, on her own, being questioned and prodded, _recorded_ , after everything she’s been through. Dealing with everyone last night was an ordeal already. But he knows there’s no way around it.

“She’s fine,” Maggie says. Daryl glances down at her. She’s frowning out at the street, and her chin wobbles even as she sets her mouth, stubborn and firm. “She’s gonna be just fine.”

Daryl doesn’t know what to say to that. He doesn’t have to figure it out, either, because a woman whose name he can’t fully remember – Marie? Sarah? – comes jogging up to them and stops on the sidewalk.

“Maggie, can you come? There’s an issue with the supplies the run crew brought in yesterday. Olivia asked me to find you.”

Maggie frowns.

“Can it wait?”

The woman – Carrie? – looks taken aback. She glances at Daryl.

“Deanna said to come to you if she’s not available,” she says, giving a helpless shrug.

Maggie nods and stands.

“Daryl, would you mind waiting for her? I wanted to be here, but… I just don’t want her to come out and no one’s here.”

Daryl nods and palms his pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket.

“Go on. I’ll be right here.”

“Thanks,” Maggie says, reaching out and touching his forearm briefly before going off down the sidewalk with the anxious-looking woman.

Daryl leans a hip against the gatepost. He pulls a cigarette out, lights it, and he waits.

Only a few minutes later, the door behind him opens. He looks up the steps to see Beth standing in the doorway, looking tired and pale. There’s a deep crease between her eyebrows. When her eyes land on him, the crease smooths out.

“Maggie was waitin’ on you,” he explains. “But some kinda fuss came up in inventory, I dunno. How’d it go?”

Beth comes down the steps to stand right next to him, furrowing her brow again.

“It was weird,” she says. She pauses, looking past him, out at the street. She shrugs her shoulders awkwardly. “It’s hard to talk about some of it.”

Daryl flicks the butt of his cigarette away, into the clean gutter. He stares down at it, then looks back to find her watching him.

Her face is tense and she looks exhausted, maybe even more so than she did the day before. Here in the daylight, up close, he sees how scarred her face is, never mind the gunshot scar at the top of her forehead. Going by what she’d said about her injuries to the group last night, there must be other scars hidden by her short hair.

There’s something different about her face, now. The scars, yes, and she looks different with her hair short. But it’s something else, too, like her face is a bowl that someone broke and then tried to glue back together. She’s just different than she was before.

She looks old, is what it is. She’s not even twenty, and she looks _old_.

He wonders how much pain he could have spared her had he done one single thing right.

“I got a hundred things I wish I’d never done,” he says. “Startin’ with tryin’ to get that damn mutt into the house for you.”

Daryl’s not sure what response he expected, but Beth smiling like she’s thinking about something good sure as hell ain’t it. 

“Yeah, the whole time I was stuck in that hospital, all I kept thinkin’ was, ‘damn that Daryl Dixon, if only he hadn’t tried to get me that dog,’” she says drily, still smiling. He must have no poker face to speak of, anymore, because her expression changes, bright dots of colour forming in her cheeks. She tilts her head at him and says, more quietly, “I’m kiddin’.”

“Ain’t funny,” he mutters, feeling stupid. He jams his hands in his pockets and scuffs his boot against the pavement. He still feels raw and she’s standing in front of him, _joking_. After everything she’s been through.

“Sorry,” she says. She bumps the toe of her boot against his. He looks up to find her watching him, looking apologetic, and he feels stupid all over again. “What are you up to today?”

“Nothin’,” Daryl says. “Why?”

“You wanna give me the grand tour? No one’s offered yet.”

Daryl blinks at her. 

Beth spent months with strangers, weeks on her own, and she’s finally back with her sister, back with all the people she wanted so badly to believe had survived, and now she wants a “grand tour” from _him_? 

She’s waiting on a reply. He clears his throat.

“Ain’t much to see,” he says, but Beth just shrugs her shoulders and smiles at him. So he reaches out and touches her elbow, and they head down the sidewalk, back in the direction of Maggie and Glenn’s place.

Daryl figures he’s a pretty shitty tour guide. He doesn’t know what to tell her except the purpose of each of the buildings they pass, the inventory and armoury and the clinic, the schoolhouse and daycare and the gardens. She doesn’t seem to mind that he doesn’t offer much, though. She just listens and asks a question or two about how the water and power work.

He points out Aaron and Eric’s place. They stop on the sidewalk, and a squirrel darts out of the small tree beside them and crosses their path. Daryl scowls at it. Bold little fucker, and him without his bow. He glances to his side to find Beth watching him, a funny, half-smile on her face.

“I’d get it, but they don’t like that much, ‘round here.”

She nods. “You still go out huntin’?” 

“Mm-hm.”

“Next time you go, you want company?”

Daryl stares at her. Odd enough that she asked him to take her around town, and now she says she wants to keep him company. She’s got family here, their whole group, and plenty of new people to befriend, besides, and she wants to go with _him _.__

__It doesn’t make any fucking sense._ _

__“You wanna go huntin’ with me?”_ _

__Beth practically beams at him, her smile indulgent, like she doesn’t get why he’d even ask a question like that, but she’s willing to humour him._ _

__“Of course. We only got partway through you teachin’ me everythin’ you know before we got interrupted.”_ _

__Daryl is momentarily overcome by the certainty that he’s dreaming. He _gotta_ be. This can’t be real. He can’t be standing here on a sunny fall day with Beth Greene as she grins at him, asking him to take her out hunting._ _

__Beth Greene, risen from the dead like something out of the dog-eared bible his mom kept in her bedside drawer. Who walked through five hundred miles of walkers and strangers and abandoned wilderness on only the faintest hope that she might find the people who left her behind. Who doesn’t seem to harbour even an ounce of bitterness in her heart for the dozens of ways he failed her._ _

__This can’t be real. Nothing about it seems like something that could possibly happen to him._ _

__But somehow it is. Somehow, she’s here. Somehow, she’s smiling at him, waiting for him to say yes._ _

__So he does. He says yes._ _

__They make plans for the following day, and the sight of her squinting in the sunlight, grinning up at him, is all of a sudden too much, and he takes off down the sidewalk to go hole himself up at Rick’s and catch his breath._ _

__He feels her gaze on his back the whole way.  
_ _

***

Daryl gets up before the sun rises.

He dresses and grabs his bow and knives, and he’s nearly at the front door when Carol’s voice stops him.

“Hey.”

Carol’s sitting in the living room, a cranky-looking Judith cuddled on her lap. 

Daryl stops and sets his bow down by the front door.

“Hey. Still teething?”

“Yep,” Carol says as she blows out a sigh. “Rick was up most of the night with her and I thought I’d cut him a break. Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

“Takin’ Beth out to hunt.”

Carol’s eyebrows pop up, a funny little smile spreading across her face. She tilts her head.

“ _What?_ ” he asks, annoyed.

“Nothing,” she says, shaking her head. “Was that your idea or hers?”

“Hers. Why?”

Carol’s smile just gets bigger.

“No reason.”

Carol stands up and brings Judith over, holding her out to him. Daryl takes her, propping her upright in the crook of his arm. Judith kicks her legs out and wobbles a bit as she balances herself.

“Watch her. I’ll be right back.”

Carol turns and disappears into the kitchen.

Judith watches him in silence, her expression very serious, then reaches up and hooks her thumb into one of his nostrils and pinches him so hard his eyes water.

“ _Ow_ ,” he mutters. Judith laughs. “When the hell’d you get so damn strong?”

Judith just grins at him and swipes for his hair, but he manages to dodge her. He swoops her back and forth a few times, and she laughs, still grabbing for his face. When he stops and gathers her close again, he feels wetness on his forearm.

“C’mon,” he says, and heads down the hallway to the bathroom, where he grabs a clean cloth diaper and a washcloth from the stash. He goes back to the living room and changes Judith on the couch while she squirms and giggles. He’s just finished wrestling her into the diaper when Carol comes in holding a paper bag in one hand.

“This is for you,” she says. “But only once you’ve washed your hands.”

Daryl scoffs and goes back to the bathroom. When he emerges, Carol’s waiting for him by the front door, Judith on her hip and the paper bag in her hand. She holds it out to him.

Curious, he unfolds the top, and a whiff of peanut butter and jelly hits his nose.

Carol leans up and kisses him on the forehead.

“Have fun.”

Daryl scowls at her.

“We’re goin’ to hunt. Ain’t goin’ out for _fun_.”

Carol gives him a long, thoughtful look, her eyes soft.

"I know you're not. That's why I'm saying it. _Have fun_ , Daryl."

Carol shifts Judith’s weight on her hip and turns away to disappear into the kitchen once again.

Daryl stares after her down the empty hallway, then goes out the front door into the cool, misty morning to head to Aaron’s. 

He lets himself into Aaron’s garage and checks the bike over to make sure it can handle a short trip. They could go on foot; he knows Beth was nervous about getting on the motorcycle. But he remembers, too, how she relaxed against his back on their way up the highway, and how tense she was when everyone gathered around her inside the walls.

Daryl checks the bike over three times before he backs it out of the garage and down the driveway to the street, sweating his ass off to push it instead of starting it in the garage and waking Aaron and Eric. Once he’s out on the street, he starts it, lets it warm up, then rides down the street to Maggie and Glenn’s place.

He stops the bike at the curb and freezes. They hadn’t actually agreed on a time, or anything, but they always used to hunt first thing, before, when it was just the two of them, and he figures she probably remembers.

He wonders if he should go knock on the door.

Daryl’s still wondering, just sitting there staring down at the red kill switch and chewing the inside of his lip ragged, when he hears the front door open.

Beth’s hurrying down the porch steps and across the lawn, headed straight for him.

She’s wearing the same denim jacket and jeans she was wearing when she found Aaron, and a dark blue hoodie underneath. She comes to a stop on the sidewalk and smiles at him, her eyes bright.

“Hey,” she says. 

Daryl can only stare at her, struck dumb.

It’s like he’s seeing her for the first time again. He still can’t seem to really believe she’s here.

She’s been haunting him for months and now she’s here, like she was never gone.

Every day since she died, his memories of her have been so _real_ that it’s often felt like she’s been by his side, whispering in his ear. Now she’s here, standing right in front of him, and he has no clue what to do.

She’s not a memory. She’s not a bunch of confusing, shitty feelings.

She’s a person, and she’s right here.

“Daryl?”

Beth’s head is cocked and her brow is furrowed.

“Mm,” he says, the sound coming out as little more than a grunt. “You good to go?”

She nods, still watching him with that quiet, searching expression that makes his face go hot.

“Hop on.”

Beth does, carefully climbing onto the bike behind him without dislodging his crossbow from its bracket. She’s just getting settled when the front door opens again, and Maggie emerges.

She comes down the steps towards them, her brow knit, and when she stops on the sidewalk a few feet from them, she crosses her arms over her chest and holds her elbows.

Daryl suddenly has the strangest feeling that he's in trouble.

But Maggie doesn't grill him or issue any rules or curfews. She just watches, lips pursed, as Beth gets settled on the bike, her thighs hugging Daryl's.

"There’s that party tonight," Maggie says. "At Deanna and Reg's? Don't forget."

"We won't," Beth says.

Something about the way she says _we_ does something strange to Daryl’s heart, making it clench and jump, and his head goes woozy for a second.

Beth taps her hand gently against his thigh, telling him to go. He glances at Maggie, at the frown on her face as she looks at the bike and at Daryl, and he can see she’s holding back something she wants to say.

“Daryl,” Beth says, very softly, her breath brushing the shell of his ear.

Daryl lets out the clutch, lifts his feet off the ground, and they pull away. 

The woman minding the front gates must hear the motorcycle coming, because the gates are already sliding open as Daryl steers the bike to them. As they pass through the gates, he rolls the throttle and they begin to pick up speed.

Beth’s arms tighten around his waist, and he feels her rest her cheek on his back.

In the eastern sky, the sun rises.

***

They hunt all morning, and Beth barely says more words than Daryl can count on his two hands.

She wasn’t like this before. She used to talk to him all the time, back when it was just them on their own. She wasn’t annoying or anything; she just liked to talk. She liked to say how she was feeling, and ask him how he was. She liked to notice things around them, and point them out to him. 

Now she’s so quiet that he doesn’t know what to do.

When the sun is high in the sky, Daryl takes her to the spring in the woods.

Beth crouches down by the edge of the shallow pool and cups a handful of sparkling water into her mouth, then swishes her fingers idly through the water a few times before standing.

Daryl sits down on the fallen tree by the spring and pulls the sandwiches out of his jacket pocket. He holds one out to Beth, and she just stares at it for a beat.

“Carol made ‘em, don’t worry.”

Beth smiles, taking the sandwich, and sits down right beside him, her knee bumping his. He takes a bite of his sandwich and tries to think about that instead of the way the whole length of her thigh is pressed against his.

Out of nowhere, Beth laughs. It’s not loud, just a quiet chuckle, but it’s so unexpected that Daryl startles.

“What’s funny?” 

“Nothing,” she says. “Just – peanut butter and grape jelly remind me of you.”

_Oh._

Peanut butter and grape jelly. Like they had that morning, the last good day, when they sat together and ate and talked and Daryl almost believed that they'd be okay.

She remembers. He’s not the only one. She _remembers_ , and it can still make her smile. 

The silence between them draws out, and, though he’s not looking at her, he can feel her eyeing him.

Everything that’s happened to her, everything she’s gone through, and she still remembers their stupid white trash brunch. It still makes her smile.

“Me too,” he says, before shoving the rest of his sandwich into his mouth. 

Only days ago, she was dead, and now they’re eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches together.

Daryl’s throat tightens and he swallows hard. 

Nothing he’s seen in his life has led him to believe in such a thing as miracles. But this, here, with her, seems to qualify, and he wouldn’t have even made it here if it wasn’t for her.

It’s like Carol said: Beth saved his life.

Maybe she ought to know that.

“Don’t think you know what you done for me.”

Daryl looks down at the rocky ground between his boots. She's watching the side of his face.

“What did I do for you?”

Daryl frowns. He's not sure why, but it bothers him that she might not know. That she might really have no idea that if it wasn't for her, he wouldn't even have survived the loss of the prison, never mind everything else since then.

He wishes he had a cigarette. He'd left his smokes in his room again, on purpose this time, not wanting to smoke around her. 

With nothing to keep his hands busy and nothing to put between his teeth, there's really only one option.

“I was lost, after they took you," he says. "Fell in with some bad people. Real bad. I didn’t know it, ‘til I did. That’s how I met up with Rick, Carl, Michonne. Then we found the others. Like they was sayin’ last night.”

“I’m glad you weren’t alone for long.”

He glances at her.

“Wasn’t alone. Had you with me.”

“What do you mean?”

Daryl huffs. He ought to know by now that anything he says, she's gonna ask questions. She’s curious. She always wants to dig deeper.

“Can’t explain it right. Just felt like… I dunno. Like you was with me. Tellin’ me what’s what. I dunno.”

“You were with me too. You _were_.”

Daryl huffs and doesn’t meet her eyes, though he can feel her staring at him.

He hasn't allowed himself to think much about what it was like for her there. Noah could have told him but Daryl never asked. He didn't want to know. What was the point? He saw those cops mow Carol down in the street. He'd watched that car peel away with Beth inside it, her backpack lying forgotten in the road. Those people didn't care about supplies. They cared about taking people by any means necessary.

Daryl never needed to know anything more than that to understand what kind of people took Beth.

_I get it now._

He remembers her saying that to the cop, her voice low and strange, something ugly there he'd never heard out of her before.

He needs to understand why she’d do that. Why she didn’t just go with him and walk down that hallway and out of that place. Why she didn’t just let him protect her and take her away from there.

The question comes tumbling out of him.

“Why’d you stab that cop?” 

Beth’s hands are in her lap, and she stares down at them.

“I’m not sure,” she says eventually. “I don’t remember that day. I mean, I think I kinda do, maybe, but I’m not sure if what I’m picturing is just ‘cause of what people have told me, you know?”

Her expression is weary and troubled, and he almost tells her to never mind it, except she keeps talking. Beth explains, or tries to. It doesn’t make a ton of sense to him, all of it coming out in fragments.

Then she says something that makes his heart fall.

_She did things to me – made me do things._

A wave of nausea sloshes in his gut. His mind races as he thinks about the dozens of fucked-up things she could mean by that. He clenches his fists, digging his fingernails into the palms of his hands.

If he could, he’d go back to Atlanta right now and burn that entire fucking hospital to the ground and piss on the ashes.

Beth’s gone quiet, just staring out at the woods before them, her eyes dull and sad. She trembles, and Daryl takes a slow, steadying breath.

It doesn’t matter. 

Whatever happened happened. It’d be no good to her now, him losing his mind about whatever hateful shit was already done to her. He has to be here with her now.

He has to _try_.

“You don’t gotta tell me what happened,” he says. “You can, if you want, but you don’t gotta. You don’t gotta explain a damn thing to me, or anybody.”

Beth blows out an abrupt sigh and shakes her head.

“I lied to Deanna. I _killed_ people.” Her voice breaks, and the sound of it makes a lump rise in his throat. “I don’t… I don’t know if I did the right thing. I never knew the whole story. It was all so… I don’t _know_ if I’m a good person, anymore.”

The anguish on her face is painful, but all of his feelings get shoved aside in an instant by the bone-deep certainty that Beth Greene is as good a person as can possibly exist in this world, before the turn or since.

_You_ do _know the difference between a good person and a bad person._

Daryl doesn’t hesitate. He reaches out and covers the clenched fist in her lap with his hand. She looks at him, eyes wide.

“You’re a good person, Beth. Whatever happened, whatever it was, you did what you had to do. And I know you wouldn’t ever hurt nobody ‘less you didn’t have no choice.”

Beth closes her eyes like she’s in pain. He lets go of her hand. When she opens her eyes again, they’re wet with tears.

“What if they don’t let me stay?”

_Then we’ll leave. I’ll go with you._

It’s a crazy thought to have, and he knows it, but he means it all the same. He’d go with her in a second, if any of them had a problem with her.

Not that that’s what she’d want. She wants to be with her sister, with the people she cares about, with walls and food and a bed, not living rough out there with him.

“Pfft. You? You’re exactly the kinda person we need here. You ain’t goin’ nowhere. Don’t worry about that.”

“But Maggie said they're trying to screen –”

“You gotta put it away,” he says. 

Beth stares at him, and the frown on her face slowly fades. She just stares and stares at him, her expression clearing, and the fear and sadness that were there seem to vanish like rain clouds after a storm. 

She moves suddenly, sidling closer to him and bending to rest her head on his shoulder, her hair tickling his cheek.

Daryl freezes.

He thinks about the time she hugged him when he came to tell her about that poor, dead boyfriend of hers. About the time she held him tight in her arms, outside that stillhouse. About the time she reached down and took his hand in the middle of a graveyard.

Because she could. Because she wanted to. Because she always seems to know when to reach out and touch him.

He wants to hold her hand again. He wants her to know he’s right here. He wants to be that way for her.

When he tries to take her hand, though, he hesitates, choking at the last second. He pulls his hand back and leaves it in his lap.

But Beth reaches over and takes his hand in hers, sliding her calloused fingers between his and gripping his hand tightly.

Daryl blows out a long sigh and closes his eyes, thrown by the sensation of her warm hand in his.

Beth shifts beside him, still leaning on his shoulder.

She’s really alive. It’s still so hard to believe. She’s right here, as real as anything, and she’s been through hell, but she made it. She survived.

Right now, holding his hand, she might even be okay.

He might be, too.

Daryl lets his cheek rest against the top of her head, holds her hand a little tighter, and doesn’t let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing around dialogue I wrote five years ago was about 100X more difficult than I anticipated. Whew!
> 
> Hope you're doing okay given all of the everything that's happening so much all the time. <3
> 
> You can find me on tumblr right [here](https://littlelindentree.tumblr.com/).


	5. returning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to M for the beta and for all the everything. <3

_Daybreak. The low hills shine  
ochre and fire, even the fields shine.  
I know what I see; sun that could be  
the August sun, returning  
everything that was taken away —_

From “October” by Louise Glück

**v: returning**

Daryl's avoided every party since arriving at the safe zone, until this one.

This one’s different.

When he gets back to Rick's after dropping Beth off, he sits on the porch and smokes. He flicks ashes onto the boards beneath his boots and he thinks about everything she told him.

How worried she is that she doesn’t belong here, that she won’t be allowed to stay. How she doesn’t think she’s a good person anymore. How those cops did things to her, made her _do things_.

Daryl frowns, watching as the breeze blows the ashes into the cracks between the boards. 

He didn’t ask her exactly what she meant by _things_. He doesn’t need to know. He can imagine plenty, after all, and it’s enough just to see how different she is. 

Whatever happened back at that hospital, and in all that time she spent out there on her own, it’s changed her.

He remembers what she said to him months ago, when it was just the two of them sitting on the porch of that shithole in the woods. How she looked up at the moon, her eyes bright and sad.

_I wish I could just change._

She's changed, all right, but who and what she is now doesn't sit right with her. That much is clear. She said she lied to Deanna. That she’s killed people.

He can only guess what the stakes must have been for her to kill a living person, and how it must be weighing on her.

But what he told her is true: he has no judgement for her. Anybody she saw fit to kill must have had it coming and then some. He’s downright _proud_ to know she’d done what she had to do to get herself free of all that shit.

She's survived, and he can't find it in himself to hate whatever choices she made to do it.

Not even her trying to kill that hollow-eyed cop, despite the hell it brough down on her. Not even that.

Beth had a reason. Even when she did wild shit like getting lit on moonshine and burning down their only shelter, she always had a reason.

If she killed someone, he knows she had cause. If a single damn one of the people here has a problem with her and says she can't stay, Daryl will go with her. Simple as that. Carol and Rick, Maggie and Glenn, all of them – they can come along or stay. That’s on them.

Wherever Beth goes, Daryl will go, as long as she'll let him.

Daryl drops the butt of his cigarette onto the porch, snuffs it out with the toe of his boot, and goes inside.

Though they didn’t do any actual hunting, he changes into a clean shirt and jeans, anyway. He pulls his vest back on and heads for the bathroom down the hall, where he brushes his teeth and cleans under his fingernails. 

He’s standing at the mirror in the foyer, pushing pointlessly at his messy hair, trying to make it do _something_ , when Rick comes down the hallway and stops. He hesitates for a moment, then takes a step closer to Daryl and leans one shoulder against the wall.

“You’re coming tonight?”

“Yeah,” Daryl says, glancing at him. “Why? What?”

Rick nods at Daryl’s reflection, something like a smile sneaking into his expression, his eyes bright. It's a kind of look Daryl hasn't seen on Rick's face in a long damn time.

“That’s good.”

Daryl rolls his eyes.

“Yeah? How’s that figure into your plans?”

He regrets the words even as he spits them out, but Rick doesn’t respond the way Daryl expects. Rick’s eyebrows draw together and he shakes his head.

“It doesn’t figure into any plans, Daryl. It’s just good. That’s all.”

Daryl turns to Rick, who’s still watching him.

“Hey, uh. Is this okay?”

Daryl gestures at himself. Rick cocks his head and knits his brow.

“Mm-hmm,” he says, looking Daryl up and down. “Fine, if we were headed to a roadhouse.”

Daryl scoffs. “Shut up.”

Rick squints. 

“Since when do you care how you look?”

“Who says I do? Just never been to one of these damn things before.”

Smiling, Rick shakes his head.

“What you’re wearin’ will be just fine. You're fine, just how you are."

Daryl blinks. 

"All right," he says, shrugging.

Rick looks like he wants to say something more, but he just nods and clears his throat, and mutters something about going to check on the kids.

Daryl glances again at his reflection. His face is flushed and his ears are bright red where they stick out of his hair. Worse, he has to admit that Glenn was right: he's starting to look like Rambo, and not in any kinda good way.

Scoffing, he turns away from the mirror and heads to the kitchen.

There he finds Carol standing at the counter, picking cocktail wieners out of a can and wrapping each one in some kind of sticky dough.

"Hey," she says, without looking up. "How was hunting?"

"Fine. Sandwiches were real good."

"Glad to hear it," she says.

“You comin’ tonight?”

“Of course. I told Deanna I’d bring pigs in a blanket.”

Daryl chews on the inside of his bottom lip, watching the side of her face.

“Sure. But you’d come anyway, right?”

Carol smiles faintly.

“It’s important to keep up appearances.”

Daryl doesn't know what to say to that. He stands there watching as Carol fusses with the casserole dish. 

"You told me once that Beth saved your life."

Carol looks up at him, eyes wide, the smile dropping from her face. 

"Yeah," she says softly, frowning. "I think she did."

Daryl nods.

"So you're comin' tonight 'cause you told Deanna you'd bring food? 'Cause you wanna keep up appearances? That all?"

Carol goes very still for a moment, frowning down at the dish in front of her. She moves, abrupt and jerky, going to the sink to wash her hands and dry them off. She covers the dish with a piece of tinfoil. Resting her hands flat on the counter, she looks up at him.

"You know, I thought it was stupid, you and me going to Atlanta, chasing that car. Searching for her. I thought you were kidding yourself. That it was pointless."

Daryl’s not surprised; she hadn’t exactly hidden her feelings, though she’d gone along with all of it regardless.

"So why'd you come?"

Carol arches an eyebrow.

"Well, you stole the car I was planning on taking, first of all."

Daryl had that much figured out, too, so he just nods.

"It wasn't only that," she says. She scrapes her thumbnail against the counter, furrowing her brow. "It was _you_. The way you were. You _knew_. You knew she was still out there and that we could find her, even though the odds weren’t… You had so much _faith_. And you were _right_."

Daryl's throat tightens and he waits for her to continue. 

"It was like a miracle, finding her. I wouldn’t have made it out of that place if it wasn't for her. And then… and then it all just went to _shit_ , and you…" 

Carol's voice wavers. She takes a deep, shaky breath in and blows it out.

"I keep thinking I've got things figured out. That I know what I have to do, who I have to _be_. To survive. To make sure _we_ survive. And then something happens that just shoots it all to shit, and I'm lost again."

Daryl looks at Carol's hands where they rest on the counter. They’re clenched hard, her knuckles white. He takes one step and another and another, until he's standing within arm's reach of her.

"Hey."

Carol looks up. Her eyes are tired and tearful. Daryl reaches out and covers one of her hands with his. 

"You can start again. We gotta. Remember?"

Carol frowns at the countertop.

“You can. You _have_. Me…” She laughs, a sad, hollow sound. “I don’t know about me.”

“You _can_ ,” he insists. “I got faith in you.”

Carol’s eyes meet his. She opens her mouth to say something, but closes it again fast, shaking her head, and then her gaze jumps over Daryl’s shoulder.

Michonne comes into the kitchen, Judith in her arms. She takes a long look at both of them.

“We’re all heading over,” she says gently.

Daryl glances over at Carol. The troubled expression on her face has been put away easy as anything, like closing the blinds on a window, dry eyes and a bland smile taking its place. 

“Let’s go,” Carol says, picking the casserole dish up and heading out of the kitchen. Michonne watches her go, then turns to Daryl and offers him an understanding smile before following her out.

The sun’s gone down since Daryl got back, the evening air crisp and cool. Down the block, Reg and Deanna’s house is lit up like a Christmas tree, a beacon of light and sound.

It’s enough to set Daryl’s teeth on edge. All that noise, so fucking _careless_ , like the safe zone itself is some kind of bubble that protects everyone inside it from everything beyond its metal walls.

A loud burst of conversation spills out as Rick opens the front door, and Daryl fights the urge to book it.

He still hates this shit. But it’s for Beth.

It’s just like the last time, only now he doesn’t linger on the sidewalk. He doesn’t walk away. He follows Rick and Carl up the steps, holds the door for Carol and Michonne and Judith, and goes inside.

The large living room is filled with people. It’s not exactly standing room only, but it’s still many more people than Daryl’s ever cared to be surrounded by, all of them clustered in small groups, glasses of wine in hand. Most everybody is dressed nicer than him by far, and he’s scowling, about to give Rick a piece of his mind, when he spots Beth across the room.

He zeroes in on her like she’s standing in a spotlight.

She’s with Maggie and Deanna, a glass in her hand. She’s wearing different clothes than she was earlier, a pair of jeans and a loose shirt the same colour as her eyes.

She looks pretty. _Real_ goddamn pretty, and for a moment all he can do is stand there and stare.

Though she’s nodding politely along to whatever they’re discussing, Daryl can see even from across the room that she’s not really listening, her expression distracted and her smile a bit forced.

Daryl sidles his way between the other guests until he arrives at Beth’s side. Reaching out, he touches her elbow.

“Hey.” 

Beth turns to look at him and her whole expression changes. She grins and her eyes light up and she steps away from the other two, towards him. 

Daryl goes still, staring at her.

He only saw her a little while ago, spent near the whole day with her. It shouldn’t mess him up so badly to see her, but it _does_ , and being completely messed up is the only explanation for the too-honest words that come falling out of his dumbass mouth.

“You look real nice.”

Beth blinks and makes a funny, surprised little sound, turning self-conscious so quickly that he wishes he hadn’t said anything at all. Her hand goes up to her forehead, like she’s trying to hide the scar that peeks out from under her shaggy hairline.

“It’s – I mean, they had to shave it all off, and it’s growing back kinda crazy, I don’t know –"

“S’cute,” he says immediately. “You could be balder than Mr. Clean and you’d still be beautiful.”

“Um, I don’t know about _that_ , but thanks,” she says, brushing it off like he’s bullshitting her or something. 

Daryl doesn’t stop to think of the right words. He only hears the insecurity in her voice and grabs hold of whatever guts made him tell her she’s beautiful in the first place.

“Modesty don’t suit you.”

Beth stares at him, eyes wide. Her mouth opens and closes, and she wobbles her head a bit, like she’s trying to figure out what to say. 

The last time he remembers leaving her speechless, they were sitting together at that kitchen table in the candlelight, eating grape jelly and talking about thank you notes and sticking around.

The last time he tried to make her understand how important she is to him.

Maggie interrupts before Beth can say a word, steering her back to talk to Deanna. Beth is none too pleased, giving Daryl an apologetic look before she goes along with her sister. He’s annoyed for a second, but he knows Maggie's just trying to get her settled in. Anyway, he's got no more claim on Beth's time and attention than anybody else here, least of all her sister. 

Turning away, he sees Aaron and Eric, and he heads in their direction.

"You're here," Aaron says, eyebrows raised.

"Yep," Daryl says, twitching the fingers of his right hand against each other, wondering how soon he can duck out for a smoke.

"We figured you might be," Eric says, smiling.

"I'm sure it means a lot to Beth that you're here,” Aaron says quickly. “This part can be pretty overwhelming."

Daryl looks back over at Beth where she stands beside Maggie, talking to Deanna. There’s an odd, strained expression on her face. He frowns.

“Are you free for dinner tomorrow night?”

Daryl turns back around. Eric is watching him expectantly.

“Maybe Beth could come? We’d love to get to know her better.”

Aaron elbows Eric again, giving Daryl an apologetic look.

“I dunno,” Daryl says, shrugging. “She’s probably busy. She and her sister got a lotta catchin’ up to do.”

Eric raises his eyebrows and is about to say something else when Olivia calls his name from across the room, waving him over. He rolls his eyes and excuses himself.

Aaron smiles after him, then turns to Daryl.

“Sorry. He’s just excited for you.”

Daryl scoffs.

“The hell for?”

Aaron eyes him for a long moment, then clears his throat.

“How are you holding up?”

“Fine,” Daryl says. “Why?”

Aaron gives him a pointed look and shrugs.

“You don’t want to talk about it. I get it. It’s fine.”

Aaron doesn’t say exactly what _it_ is, but he also obviously doesn’t need to. Daryl feels his cheeks heat.

“Come for dinner tomorrow, all right? You don’t have to ask Beth if you don’t want to. But you’ll come, yeah?”

When Daryl nods, Aaron smiles, and then changes the subject completely to planning their next trip out of the safe zone.

A movement catches Daryl’s attention, and he sees Beth leaving Maggie’s side. She ducks around Sasha and Michonne, and he figures she's headed for the bathroom. He drags his attention back to the conversation in front of him. Aaron’s saying something about an apple orchard they hit last fall that they ought to check out, and Daryl tries to give a shit about how useful a truckload of apples would be, but he’s too aware of the minutes as they tick by. 

Beth doesn't come back.

Aaron’s still talking, but Daryl interrupts him.

“Gonna go for a smoke,” he says, and turns away. He knows it’s rude, but he can’t seem to care right now. He weaves through the crowd to the hallway. The bathroom door is open and the room is empty; there’s nowhere else she could have gone except out the front door.

Frowning, he goes out onto the porch.

The porch and the sidewalk are empty, the neighbourhood quiet but for some crickets chirping nearby. He catches a faint whiff of an unpleasant, sour smell – puke, maybe – and he frowns.

Daryl walks to the top of the porch steps and looks down the street just in time to see the motion-detecting porchlight at Maggie and Glenn’s go dark.

He hops off the top step and heads down the sidewalk.

When he gets to the front door, he knocks softly, but there’s no response. The door’s unlocked, and he hesitates for a moment. Probably ain't his place. He oughta turn around and head back to get Maggie. It's probably weird to do what he's doing.

But Beth’s in there and something’s wrong. He _knows_ something’s wrong.

Daryl pushes the door open and goes into the house.

It’s dark inside and it takes his eyes a moment to adjust. As the door shuts behind him, he hears a quiet, pained whimper.

She's lying on the couch, her arms up and covering her eyes.

Her _head_. Her busted skull. The way it was split open by that bullet, the blood all over his arms and his face, pooling on the floor. How it soaked the hair those people cut from her head.

Daryl’s guts twist. He can only guess what an injury like that leaves a person with.

He goes into the half-bathroom off the foyer and grabs a washcloth. He soaks it in cold water and goes back out to her, hoping he’s not about to scare the shit out of her, but unwilling to speak and cause her more pain. He's had a few migraines, but his skull's never been cracked open by a bullet, so he’s pretty sure he has no idea what she’s going through.

“Hey,” he says when he gets to her side, talking as quietly as he can. She doesn’t startle; she doesn’t respond at all.

He stands over her for a moment, uncertain, then leans down and nudges her hands aside and puts the cloth on her forehead.

“Mm,” she mutters, her voice low and tight with pain.

A moment later, she opens her eyes the tiniest fraction and peers up at him.

“Migraine?” he whispers. 

She nods once, slowly. Moving her head at all must hurt like hell.

_Fuck’s sake._ He had her up early to hunt when she already had the stupid party to deal with. No wonder she’s all fucked up.

Shame turns his stomach.

“Hm,” he says. “Shoulda said somethin’. Hold on.”

He goes back to the bathroom and finds the house’s ration of meds. There’s nothing too strong, just basic painkillers, but he taps a couple of pills out into his palm, then goes to the kitchen for a glass of water. 

When he returns to her side, he slides one arm under her shoulders and sits her up. Her body’s rigid with tension, but she lets him.

“Take these.”

She pulls the cloth from her eyes and squints down at the pills in his hand, her face a pinched frown.

“No," she says. "We gotta save those, other people need ‘em more.”

_Other people_. 

The girl hauled her ass through six hundred miles of walkers and psychos and who the fuck knows what else, her body still healing from wounds no one should even be able to recover from, and she thinks _other people_ ought to have her damn Advil.

“Nobody needs nothin’ more than you.”

Beth blinks softly and doesn’t reply. But she takes the pills and pops them into her mouth. When he hands her the glass of water, she downs the whole thing, the washcloth still clutched in one hand.

The moment she’s done the water and she’s set the glass aside, he crouches and lifts her up into his arms. Her arms loop around his neck and she exhales a soft little breath that touches his jaw. As he heads for the stairs, she lets her head fall against his shoulder.

Daryl gets her upstairs, where she points the way to her room. He carries her to the dim, moonlit bedroom, his eyes roaming around as he puts her down on the bed as carefully as he can. It’s a little kid’s room. There’s no real trace of her yet, not like there was back at the prison, where she found all kinds of things to decorate that grungy little cell and make it her own. Here, there’s just her ragged backpack slumped by the nightstand and a small stack of folded clothes sitting on top of the dresser.

It looks like she could cram everything into that backpack and be gone in seconds.

Beth’s squinting at him from the bed. Chewing on his bottom lip, he leans over and takes off her boots, setting them on the floor. 

“This happen a lot?” 

“Yeah,” Beth replies, nodding. “Since the… Well, you know.”

Since the point-blank gunshot wound that should have killed her. 

_Right._

Daryl exhales tightly. She left the party in this much pain without saying a word to anybody, not even Maggie. Just up and dealt with it on her own, like there was nobody there who’d give a shit.

She’s been on her own so long, fending for herself, that maybe she didn’t even think of it.

“You’re tough,” he says. “All right? Don’t gotta prove it to nobody by sufferin’ through this. We don’t gotta live like that no more.”

“I’m not trying to prove anything,” Beth grumbles. She puts the cloth over her forehead and leaves her hands there, pressing them against her eyes. “Just trying not to be a burden.”

“ _Burden_ ,” Daryl repeats. _Christ, she’s stubborn_. “Doubt you’ve ever been a burden a day in your life.”

Beth doesn’t respond to that. Her mouth twists, but she doesn’t say a word.

Daryl stands over her for a moment, and then turns away, at a loss. 

Beside an unplugged clock radio and a small, half-burned candle, there’s a little plastic figurine on the nightstand, one of those cheap dashboard deals, the type of crap you’d see for sale by the register at gas stations. It's a flower in a pot, and the flower wears a cheerful grin and sunglasses. It looks out of place in the room, the plastic grungy and sunbleached.

He looks back over at Beth. She’s perfectly still, her breathing deep and steady, her hands holding the cloth to her eyes. He should go. She doesn’t need company; she needs to sleep.

“Get some rest.”

Daryl turns to leave, but Beth’s hand darts out and grabs his. He stops.

“Stay.”

He stares down at her. She’s still holding the cloth over her eyes with one hand, the other wrapped tightly around his fingers. She squeezes him, and it takes him by surprise, how strong her grip is.

_Stay_. He isn’t really sure what she means. Stay here and sit on the floor and shoot the shit while she suffers through a migraine, he guesses, though it makes no goddamn sense. She doesn’t need him. She just needs to rest.

“Ain’t why I came to check on you,” he says.

“I know. But so what?”

“Yeah, well, Maggie’ll have somethin’ to say about it, she gets home and finds me here in your bedroom.”

He isn’t kidding, but something about what he says makes Beth laugh. It’s a pained, limp little laugh, but it’s a laugh, and pure joy bolts through him at the sound of it.

She squeezes his hand again, and he realises that his heart is pounding in his chest.

"You laughin’ at me, girl?”

The words come out sounding funny to him, breathless almost, and he feels his face heat.

“Yes,” she says, smiling, her eyes still hidden by the washcloth. She releases his hand and moves, then, shifting over to the far side of the narrow bed, leaving a space beside her that he can’t mistake.

_Stay_.

She wants him to, so he does. It’s really that simple.

Daryl sits on the edge of the bed and toes off his boots, then swings his legs up onto the bed so that he’s leaning back against the headboard, his legs alongside her body and her head beside his hip.

He hopes she doesn’t stay up on his account. It’s been a long day and she’s only been here two nights. She needs rest, not parties and hunting and putting up with everyone's needy bullshit. No wonder her head’s acting up.

Daryl picks at the bed of one thumbnail, aggravated.

_Christ_ , they’re all so fucking selfish about her. Him especially.

But she doesn’t go to sleep easy, like he hoped. After a spell, she tugs the washcloth off her eyes.

“Daryl, know what I saw when I was out there?”

“What?”

“I was checkin’ out a house and I found one of those ugly planters shaped like a bikini top. Like the one we found, remember? In that old stillhouse in the woods?”

“I remember.”

“I stayed for the night but in the morning I burned the whole place down.”

Daryl looks down at her. It’s too dark in the room to see her whole expression, but he thinks maybe she’s smiling.

“No shit?” 

“No shit. Burned that sucker right to the ground.”

Daryl shakes his head, thinking about the night they burned the place in the woods down, just for kicks. Just because they could.

Just because she wanted to _do something_.

Perfectly good shelter and she burned that down, too. He doesn’t know what to make of that. It’s something to do with him, he guesses, but he doesn’t understand. Why would she bother?

The room is silent but for the sound of her breathing and his. He sits there listening to the sounds fall into and out of pace with each other.

He sits there and wonders _why_.

_Why’d you do that?_

_Why’d you want to spend the day with me?_

_Why’d you ask me to stay?_

It’s on the tip of his tongue, but her eyes are closed and she’s gone quiet, so he doesn’t ask.

Beth’s breathing is deep and even, and Daryl’s starting to think she might have fallen asleep, when her voice, soft and rough and low, breaks the silence.

“I missed this.”

It feels like his heart trips over itself.

Blowing out a tight breath, he doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t choke like he did earlier, trying to hold her hand, unsure of himself and her. He’s no more sure of anything now, but somehow, he doesn’t choke.

Daryl reaches out and brushes a strand of hair off her forehead.

He finds the healed crater in her skull as his thumb passes over it. He means to pull his hand away, but instead it skates across her soft hair until he finds himself cradling the top of her head.

Her head, broken and healed at the same time, under his own hand. Her life, right here.

He swallows the painful lump in his throat.

“Me too.”

Beth shifts closer to him, but doesn’t say another word.

Daryl lets his hand rest on her head, his fingers trailing through her short hair, and he feels it in his fingertips when the tension finally leaves her body and she falls asleep.

Feeling strange, suddenly, about touching her while she’s asleep, he carefully pulls his hand back and rests it in his lap.

It’s a lot like how it was, before, when it was just the two of them, after they had it all out at that dump in the woods. After that, she got closer to him and he quit pushing her away. They’d camp out in the open and rig up their sad little string of garbage to act as a walker alarm, and Daryl would take first watch while Beth got some sleep beside him. That’s where she liked to be, right at his hip. She even held his wrist in her sleep, a time or two, while he watched their campfire die and wondered how long he could keep them both alive.

It’s just like that, but better in every way because they’re under a roof, and everyone they care about is here, and suddenly the protection of the safe zone, however flimsy, isn’t so damn stupid to him.

Suddenly, it feels like this place really could be his home.

Beth sighs, deep and content, and rolls towards him, onto her side. A moment later, her stomach growls.

Daryl looks down at her, at her face so close to his body and her hands tucked under her chin, and he feels a strange sense that this is not reality. That this is a memory, or a dream that’s about to end, and he’s seconds away from waking up in his own bed, staring up at the ceiling, with Beth rotting away to nothing in that car six hundred miles away, the way he imagined her all these months.

It’s disorienting, the way he can’t seem to accept that she’s here. His throat tightens as he listens to the sound of her steady breathing.

Daryl rubs his thumb against the scar on the back of his hand.

She kissed him there. She was gentle as could be and didn’t make him explain, but he feels like maybe she knew, somehow. That she understood. And then she kissed it.

She kissed _him_.

Daryl closes his eyes and breathes.

He thinks of all the times he wished he could talk to her again, how he’d have given just about anything to have five more minutes with her.

Now he can, and all those words he came up with while she was gone are stuck in his throat.

Words like _missing_ and _love_. None of it is the kind of shit he can actually _say_ to her. It’s all stuck inside him, smacking around inside his chest like a bird trapped in a room.

It’s all stuck inside him where it damn well _belongs_. 

Downstairs, the front door creaks open.

Daryl tenses,but then he hears low, familiar voices and quiet footsteps on the stairs, and he relaxes. It’s Maggie and Glenn.

Moments later, there’s a quiet knock on the door, too quiet to wake Beth, and no pause whatsoever before the door opens and Maggie’s face appears.

Maggie’s eyes go from him to Beth and back again, and then she stares at him, her mouth dropping open.

" _Migraine_ ," he mouths, touching his forehead.

Maggie's brow furrows. She’s never been tough for Daryl to read, but he doesn’t know what to do with the stormy, confused expression on her face.

She looks down at Beth again and stares for several moments, then steps back out of the doorway and closes the door with a soft click. He hears her continue down the hallway, and then the click of another door.

Seconds later, he hears Glenn giggle through the wall.

_For fuck's sake._

There’s no one looking at him, but he blushes so fiercely he can feel the heat in his ears.

Maggie and Glenn are both here now. He should ease off the bed and leave the room and let Beth get the rest she needs.

But he doesn't.

He sits beside her as she sleeps, deep and unmoving, and he listens to her breathe.

The moonlight in the room soon dims to almost nothing, the moon disappearing behind the clouds, he guesses. It’s so dark he can barely make out Beth’s pale face at his hip.

Daryl fishes out his lighter. Flicking it open, he leans over and lights the candle on the nightstand.

Beth mutters something in her sleep and shifts, reaching out and taking hold of his arm where it lies on the bed between them.

Daryl eases his lighter back into his pocket, trying not to disturb her. As he does, his knuckles nudge the knives at his belt.

Her knife. He's got her knife.

Beth sighs, still asleep, and lets go of his arm.

Daryl carefully unbuckles the sheath of her knife from his belt. He holds the leatherbound blade in his hands and looks down at it, wondering.

Did she have a knife when she was on her own? Did she have one when he and Aaron brought her in? He can't remember.

All he knows is that he had her knife the whole time she was gone, and that she must have needed it, that she could have died for want of it. His stomach rolls over.

That she's here, _alive_ , is a fucking wonder, considering the dozens of ways he nearly made it impossible.

_I should go_ , he thinks. He should leave the knife on her nightstand beside the plastic flowerpot and go back to Rick's. He'll see her around from time to time, when he's gotta make the occasional command appearance at group dinners, and that'll be fine. That would be enough.

That would be so much more than he deserves.

He's still thinking about sliding his feet off the bed and grabbing his boots when Beth opens her eyes.

She doesn't say a word.

She stares up at him, and her gaze feels heavy. Seconds tick by and still she doesn't say a goddamn thing. Beth, the girl who once made him play a stupid drinking game with her just to have a reason to talk with him.

Finally he can’t take the silence.

“Quit starin’ at me.”

She smiles.

“Hey.” She looks at the knife in his hand. "You know, I had them turn that hospital inside out lookin’ for that knife.”

Daryl’s stomach drops, and he just about shoves it at her in his hurry to give it back.

“Here.”

“ _Daryl_ ,” she mutters, the gentlest scold. She takes it from him, though, shifting up onto her elbow. Turning the knife over in her hands, she makes a soft, thoughtful sound in her throat. “Where’d you get it?”

“Carol. She thought I’d want it.”

There’s a pause.

“Did you?” 

Beth’s voice is soft and low, almost a whisper. Daryl doesn’t understand the tightness in his chest, the stupid fluttering in his stomach. When he glances at her, he finds her watching him, her eyes wide and shining in the faint candlelight.

“Yeah,” he says, “I did.”

Beth blinks and looks down at the knife in her hand. It looks good there, it looks _right_ , like it’s back where it belongs, but she’s holding it like she doesn’t really want it. 

Daryl remembers the little pair of surgical scissors lying in a puddle of her blood on the linoleum floor. 

Maybe she’s grown tired of weapons, after everything.

Daryl clears his throat.

“Your sister came to check on you when she got home. Stuck her head in to say g’night.”

“Oh?”

“Stuck her head back out pretty quick, too.”

Beth’s face opens up into a wide smile, and she sets the knife down on the bed between them, shrugging the shoulder that isn’t holding up her weight.

“Good thing she’s still walkin’ on eggshells around me or else I’d probably be in for an earful.”

Daryl winces.

Beth’s not wrong; Maggie didn’t look too thrilled about finding him there, and he figures the only reason she didn’t haul him out by his ear was because Beth was asleep.

But it wasn’t that long ago that him and Maggie sat on her back porch and she took the time to give a shit about him, without ever making him talk about it.

Maggie’s his family, too.

Daryl glances at Beth.

“Go easy on her. Losin’ you was…Just go easy on her.”

Beth’s face falls, her smile disappearing like smoke into the wind, and Daryl realises he’s gone ahead and said the exact wrong thing.

She doesn’t need this.

Like it’s her problem, her fucking _job_ , to make them all comfortable. Beth’s the one they left behind. She’s the one who’s been hurt and abandoned and had to go it completely alone.

Last thing she needs is to worry about everyone else’s feelings, after everything she’s been through.

Beth doesn’t say anything. She just lies there beside him, quiet, looking down at that goddamn knife, choosing not to tear a strip off him, even though she’s done it before. Even though he’d deserve it, just like he did back at that stillhouse when she snapped him out of it.

She’s so brave. She’s so _good_.

It still feels like she can’t be real.

“Last two days, I woke up thinkin’ I musta lost my damn mind. I lie there tryin’ to figure out if it’s real or not,” he says. A strange, hollow laugh takes him by surprise and he shifts uncomfortably. “Hard to shake it.”

Daryl stares down at his hands resting in his lap.

Beth’s watching him; he can tell without even turning his head to see. When she takes a shaky breath in, he thinks she’s about to speak, maybe about to bring the hammer down and give him what for, like he’d thought she would, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t say anything at all.

She moves.

Nudging him, she hitches herself up the bed, working herself under his arm. She pulls herself right up against him and rests her head on his chest.

Daryl freezes.

Gravity does most of the work for him as he brings his arm down around her back, his hand landing under her ribs. That must be what she wants, _must be_ , cuddling up to him like this, but he’s still stunned. 

Beth stretches her arm across his chest and holds him.

Holding him together and letting him fall apart, just like always.

“I’m alive,” she whispers. “I’m here.”

Daryl tries to breathe, but it gets stuck in his throat as he blinks back the tears that well in his eyes. He exhales and lets his hand come up to cradle her head where it rests on his chest.

Her poor, busted head, healed and hurting, but not dead. Not rotting. Not gone.

_Right here._

He holds her close and breathes in the clean, plain scent of her hair, trying not to blubber all over her again.

“I need you to let it go, now,” she says, her voice calm and firm but terribly kind, too. “I’m here. I’m back. It was horrible. I’ll never know how horrible it was for you, and you’ll never know how horrible it was for me.” 

She might not know everything that happened while she was gone. She might not know about the worms and the dirt and the walkers and the blood under his nails and the ugliness he’s carried inside him. But she saw that scar on his hand and understood what it was. She might not know everything, but she sees what a mess he’s become without her.

Daryl should be ashamed, he thinks, or embarrassed, but he doesn’t. He isn’t. Instead, there’s relief like nothing he’s felt before in his whole life. It's like stepping under the spray of a hot shower, the way it washes over him. 

She sees. She knows, and she’s still right here.

“But you have to put it away.”

He closes his eyes and swallows the lump in his throat. Those words saved his life, once, and here she comes again, turning him around, making him face forward instead of always back.

He remembers what comes next.

“What if I can’t?”

Beth’s face is tucked against his chest so he can’t see her, but he can _feel _her smile, and he can hear it in her voice when she answers.__

__“You have to. Or it kills you. Here.”_ _

__She lays her hand over his heart. His breath catches in his throat and he remembers the way she sat on that porch in the moonlight and tapped her chest with her fingers._ _

___Here._ _ _

__She’s worried she’s not a good person anymore, that she’s unworthy of this place. He can’t shake her out of it all at once, make her see how important she is, how strong and brave and _good_ , but he can try._ _

__He lays his free hand over hers and wraps his fingers around hers._ _

__“That’s what you done for me. That right there.”_ _

___You. You changed my mind. You saved my life._ _ _

___You._ _ _

__Beth shifts, sitting up a little, and lifts her head. Her cheeks are wet with tears, but her mouth curves upwards and her shining eyes crinkle at their corners._ _

__He said the right thing this time. Somehow, the exact right thing._ _

__Though he’s still holding her hand with his, he thinks about cupping her chin in his palm, about touching her cheek and the edge of her smile with his thumb, but he doesn’t have the time to even think about how he might go ahead and do that, because something else happens._ _

__Beth leans in and kisses him._ _

__It’s quick and light, more his cheek than his lips, and she pulls back almost right away, her eyes wide, like she’s taken herself by surprise every bit as much as she’s taken him._ _

__Daryl has no idea what to do. She’s caught him off guard, totally unprepared for this._ _

__Beth’s watching his face so closely, so thoughtfully, and she must see something there, like she always seems to, because only seconds pass before she’s pressing her soft lips to his._ _

__All the air in his chest rushes out his nose. She smiles into the kiss and shifts closer to him._ _

__Daryl lets go of her hand to hold onto her upper arm, holding her closer with his other arm._ _

__Her fingers tighten on his chest, gripping his shirt, and they hold onto each other, breathing each other’s air and barely moving as they kiss._ _

__Daryl has no idea what to do with himself, no idea how he’s supposed to do this. He didn’t prepare for this, couldn’t have; he hadn’t even been able to admit to himself that this is something he’s wanted._ _

__Never mind her wanting it, too. Never mind _having_._ _

__But it’s happening. She’s kissing him and he’s kissing her right back, and suddenly he knows with absolute certainty that _this_ is what he wants. This is all he wants. A bed and a roof over their heads and her hand on his heart as she smiles into his kisses like everything he’s doing is somehow just exactly what she wants, too._ _

__Beth exhales a long, shaky sigh, her body trembling against his, and he remembers what brought him here. She’s exhausted and overwhelmed and she needs to get some real rest. He breaks the kiss._ _

__“I should go ‘fore everyone’s up.”_ _

__Her eyes blink sleepily open as he watches her, hoping against hope that she gets what he’s trying to say without him having to say it._ _

__She smiles and takes his hand and his heart jumps because she does. Of course she does._ _

__Downstairs, he lingers on the porch when she follows him outside, closing the front door behind her and standing in the beam of the porchlight overhead. She doesn’t say goodnight or go back inside, so he stays put, shoving his hands into his pockets, unsure what else to do with them._ _

__Beth smiles up at him, but he can see the strain there, the tiredness still dragging her expression downwards. The harsh light overhead darkens the scars on her face, emphasizing them and the sharp lines of her face._ _

__“You all right?”_ _

__Wrapping her arms around herself, Beth shrugs. Her smile falters._ _

__“Yeah. I’m okay. It’s just… It’s hard to get used to all this. It’s… It looks safe. And a lot of the time it feels safe. But it doesn’t feel like home. You know?”_ _

__Yeah, he knows._ _

__He isn’t about to dump a bunch of empty promises on her about what a swell place this is and how it’s all smooth sailing from here on out. They both know better._ _

__But there’s one thing he knows for certain, one thing he can promise her. One thing he’ll stake his life on._ _

__“Anythin’ happens, shit goes bad, we can’t keep this place – we run. Simple as that. Done it before, we can do it again. You won’t get left. Not again. Not _ever_.”_ _

__Her eyes go round, shining with tears that don’t fall. She looks him straight in the eye, unspeaking, and she nods._ _

__It’s intense, keeping eye contact with her when her face looks like that, and Daryl finds himself looking down at the porch._ _

__Daryl’s feet point towards Beth, and hers are pointing right back at him, her body square to his. Sucking in a breath, Daryl digs deep to find whatever courage he had ten minutes ago, and he looks up, meeting her eyes._ _

__“Aaron and Eric have me over for dinner now and then. Headin’ over there tomorrow night. You wanna come?”_ _

__Her whole expression changes on him again, the tension and exhaustion draining away, replaced by a slow smile._ _

__“Like a _date_?”_ _

__Her tone is amused but kind, somehow, and he knows she’s not laughing at him. Still, he feels his face heat, and he fights the urge to turn tail and stomp off into the night._ _

__“Yeah, like a _date_. Damn.”_ _

__Beth laughs, but it too is a kind sound, warm and happy, and Daryl thinks about how it felt when she kissed him, how it felt to have that breath, that voice, on his skin._ _

__“I’d love that,” she says, and it’s incredible, how his stupid heart absolutely leaps for joy._ _

___I love_ you, he thinks._ _

__“A’right,” he says instead, his breath short. He swallows hard and digs the sharp point of one canine into the inside of his bottom lip._ _

__He wants to kiss her again._ _

__He wants to kiss her good and hard and completely. He wants to kiss her goodnight right now, and good morning tomorrow, and he wants to kiss her every day of the rest of his life, and he wants to kiss her a dozen times for every single day that they were apart._ _

__He’s never felt this way before. He didn’t even think he _could_ feel this way. Deep down, truly, he didn’t think anybody really felt this way. _ _

__But he does. The way she’s still smiling at him, just watching him and smiling, her arms still hugging her middle, makes him think that maybe, somehow, that’d be all right with her._ _

__Daryl takes a steadying breath in and steps towards her, intending to put his hands on her shoulders, but he finds himself cradling the back of her neck instead. Beth goes completely still, her eyes wide, as he traces the path of the scar on her cheek with his thumb._ _

__Part of him wants to know what happened. Part of him can't stand to find out._ _

__Maybe it doesn't matter._ _

__Maybe ugly places have wasted enough of both their lives._ _

__Maybe they get to start over in this place, for real; put all that shit behind them for good and _live_._ _

__Probably not. He doesn’t know._ _

__But he does know that he loves her, and he wants her to understand that he’d have died if she hadn’t made him get up on his feet that first night after the prison. He wants her to know her ghost kept him alive, but he’s been half-dead since she’s been gone._ _

__He can’t seem to say all that. But he can find one thing to say. One true thing he needs her to know, right now._ _

__“Best thing I ever saw, you runnin’ towards me.”_ _

__He closes his eyes and kisses her before he can see what she thinks of that. She unclasps her arms and grabs hold of his vest and kisses him back._ _

__It’s like this comes naturally to her, the way she stands there kissing him, her hands gripping his vest tightly. Like it’s something they’ve done before, something they’ve always done. Like she was never gone and he was never lost and there’s never been a single unanswered question between them._ _

__They kiss and kiss until Beth pulls back and gulps down a shaky breath, and Daryl remembers that she’s supposed to be resting. He’s supposed to be leaving her alone. _Christ_. He hugs her to him and kisses her forehead._ _

__When he lets go of her and steps back, she’s smiling._ _

__“Night, Beth.”_ _

__“Night, Daryl,” she says, her voice soft and husky._ _

__He goes, finally, and leaves her standing there in the beam of the porchlight, and as he walks away he’s absolutely sure she stays put and watches him go._ _

__At Rick’s, he lets himself in and closes the door behind him. He stands there for a moment, listening to the heavy quiet of a house full of people fast asleep, then goes into his dark bedroom._ _

__He strips his clothes off and climbs into bed, the sheets smelling of burnt tobacco and his own skin and faintly, still, the detergent Carol uses for all their things._ _

__Daryl closes his eyes and falls asleep._ _

__He dreams of the ocean._ _

__His feet are bare and the water is cold. The breeze touching his skin is warm, though, and the sky is pink and orange and purple, all melting into one another like ice cream. Waves roll into the shore, shoving at his legs, but he can’t hear the sound of the water. He can only hear the pounding of his heart, the rush of his own blood in his ears._ _

__He’s never been to the ocean before._ _

__His chest feels tight, like he’s scared or excited, and he can’t tell which it is._ _

__Beth's here._ _

__She stands in the surf beside him, the rolled-up hems of her jeans soaked. Her hair is loose, longer, blowing across her face. The sunrise paints her skin and her hair warm gold, makes her look like she’s glowing._ _

__She takes his hand._ _

__"C'mon. You can do it. You _can_."_ _

__She tugs him along behind her as the water rises up her thighs to her hips, drenching her clothes. The water is cold enough to sting his skin, but it doesn’t bother him; her hand is warm in his._ _

__They trudge through the rolling surf, past their hips and their bellies, up to their chests, until Beth pulls hard on his hand and surges forward, her feet leaving the ocean floor._ _

__Daryl follows her as she rolls onto her back, laughing, soaked and splashing, still clinging tightly to his hand._ _

__They float, held up by the rolling water to the bruised purple sky and the rising sun._ _

__They tangle their fingers together and hold on._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This could very well have been the end of this fic, but it isn't. Bloop! Stay tuned. Thank you for reading. <3
> 
> Thanks also for all the love during the [2020 UBFL Moonshine awards](https://ultimatebethylficlist.com/moonshine-awards/)!
> 
> Find me on [tumblr](https://littlelindentree.tumblr.com/).


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